This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Python Buzz
by Jake Cutter.
Original Post: One way Python smacks Ruby around...
Feed Title: Convince me to use Python
Feed URL: http://convincemetousepython.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Feed Description: Learning to love Python...one day at a time...
Ruby is a beautiful language. Far more beautiful, in my very subjective opinion, than Python. However, beauty, as they say, is only skin deep. Below the skin lies the equally important bits: implementation, documentation, portability, performance and more.
I will expound my findings "beneath the skin" in future posts, but I ran across something today so telling of my general experience, syntax aside.
Look at these two urls. Both are from the official* standard library documentation for the respective language.
Absolutely no comparison. Python functionality is documented clearly...Ruby's documentation amounts to a method prototype and nothing more.
While this is just one example, I've run across it sooooooooo many times in the last three years. It's such a sad state of affairs that the official Ruby web sitedoesn't even *have* a documentation section of its own...it simply links to a collection of tutorials and third-party docs. Ruby-doc.org, which I pulled the above link from, takes the same approach, but includes the generated rdoc for the core and std libs. This rdoc is often, as demonstrated above, simply empty method prototypes.
It's simply tragic that such a useful and appealing tool has such shoddy documentation.
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