I looked for a new language for my hobby programming. I used to use Turbo Pascal for 10 years and then C++ for 6 years. A couple of weeks ago, I narrowed my decision to C#, Ruby, and Python. At the moment, I want to go with Python, but you can definitely see that it's the oldest one: Many parts of its syntax are awkward and look like patchwork.
You mean you think Ruby syntax is less awkward then Python ?
It is actually. Ruby's syntax is mostly consistent and coherent, and there is much less special cases than in Python.
Now it's also much more difficult to grasp Ruby for programmers coming from procedural languages, but that's another story.
Maybe you should add Perl to your list of languages to learn especially after your complaints about the decorator syntax.
I guess you stopped your exploration of Ruby at the first sign of 'special chars' syntax.
I don't like Perl, I still prefer to use Python (over Ruby) for a number of good and less good reasons, but I somewhat share Fernando's (and some other's people here) concerns about the future of MyFavoriteLanguage.
Bruno -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
