I thought about going for Ruby but although Rails seems to be popular with all the Web 2.0 stuff, Python came across as more “practical”. That and Ruby just came across as a little too “out there” in syntax for me. For example. Object.each seems strange because the iterator should be a keyword not a call to the object itself… but that’s just my view on it.

It’s by no means a disregard for Ruby more a sense or feeling that led me to go with Python. Though looking @ MapReduce and Hadoop I’ve been impressed with what I’ve read about the Ruby implementation “SkyNet”.

I really like the “MapReduce” model, I could think of a few ways to better search photos if I had a cluster setup but I’m not there yet.

As you said though it’s interesting to work with languages “outside our day job” so I’m glad you’ve been getting to play too!

I’ve never really done much with Python, but I do enjoy Ruby. You eventually get used to writing loops like

Object.each do |obj|
….
end

which is really strange when I spend all my day-job time writing C++. Ruby has a tertiary operator much like C/C++’s, it’s the one element of familiarity I have when working with it.

Just saw the blog in your Facebook profile…

-Kevin