[hakaaak]

I was interested in Go because of its brevity, speed, and because Rob Pike wrote it.

Reading this I see a lot of the reasons I like Ruby: no worrying about different constructors or needing to worry excessively about types. If only Ruby treated everything, even the little bit that is syntax, as mutable objects, it would be near-perfect (and it would basically be Lisp). But, it's close enough.

Maybe if Go could become Ruby...

[damian2000]

Having done a bit of development in both, I found I got productive in Go quicker than with Ruby. With Ruby, there's many ways to do the same thing. That might be great when you're experienced with the language, but for someone starting out it can be daunting. The compexity of installing RVM put me off also - I was never able to install it on Linux properly so ended up using the version that came with the Ubuntu package manager, which was an old version.

[hakaaak]

You don't have to install RVM, but it does help. It was never that difficult for me, but I use OS X for Ruby dev mostly.

And there may be a variety of ways of doing things, but that's because (1) Ruby has been more well-used than Go, and (2) it has more flexible loops, etc. to make it less verbose, and yes there are a variety of ways to add methods, attributes, etc. but after you spend a little time to understand how the Ruby object model works, you'll understand why- almost everything is an object. Also, the language has evolved, so there are some differences in syntax between 1.8 and 1.9 but you can still use 1.8 syntax in 1.9.

[damian2000]

Yeah agreed Ruby is more powerful especially with loops. The object model and that methods are messages passed between objects is also great, once you understand it.