[repsilat]

> but why?

In Python (almost?) any unqualified identifier you see in an expression is either a builtin function or it's defined/imported somewhere else in the file. I find Ruby a little stressful by comparison (without even getting into the awful cultural approval of defining the names of things procedurally, ensuring you'll never find where they came from...)

The lack of parens on function calls also adds uncertainty for me. I know in Python you can overload `__getattr__` and introduce just as much magic, but for the most part I can be confident that `a.b` doesn't do anything too crazy. That's the general trend for me -- Python is almost relentlessly boring, with a few little surprises that stick out mostly because everything else is so plain and sensible. Ruby is just a little crazier everywhere, partly because the language is a bit more eccentric and partly because the people who use it are all Ruby programmers :-)

[pmontra]

My why was about why one should design a language in that way and not think harder and make it look better, but in the early days of Python there weren't many other OO languages around, so I can understand that it could have been natural to go somewhat low level and mimic C (even with all those __s). Maybe some language went more high level and died because of that. Python passed the test of time so that (self): probably was a good idea at the end of the 80s / early 90s.

In the case of Ruby, you can't name a function (which is a method) without executing it. That's why () don't matter much. The optional () also make Ruby a good language to write DSLs. By the way, if you want to get a reference to a method, you must prepend it with a &, pretty much like in C. Ha! :-) This demonstrates that every language has its quirks. Or you can call a method by sending a message to its object like object.send(:method) using a symbol named after the method. That's more or less a reference to it, which can be metaprogrammed because symbols can be built from strings ("something".to_sym). Is that the "defining the names of things procedurally" you don't like? On the other side, I find stressful that in Python you have to enumerate all your imports, like in Java. It's the same in Ruby, but I'm almost always programming in Rails and it auto imports everything. All those imports in Django and Web2py are tiresome. I got naming clashes with Rails only a couple of times in 10 years but I missed imports many times in Django yesterday.

I learned Python after Ruby. My trajectory was BASIC in the 80s, Pascal, C, Perl, a little TCL, Java and JavaScript since their beginning, Ruby since Rails, a little Python and PHP a few years later, much less Perl now and almost nothing of what preceded it, some Elixir. I keep using Ruby and JS, I'm using Python now. I insist that compared to Pascal, Java and Ruby Python looks illogical and unnecessarily complex, but I can understand why people with a different history can feel like Ruby is eccentric. I remember when I demoed it to some PHP developer many years ago, he said it was like writing in English, which was surprising because it is not how it looks to me, but it felt flattering.

[cma]

I like the __'s, when listing methods you can immediately scan it and ignore all the built-in stuff if you want, to see what is special about this object.

In order to get "split" in ruby for a sequence, at least a one time, hopefully cleaned up by now, you end up mixing in some huge number of methods and made any method list in the console impossible to read.