Comment by Demiurge

> "Everything must be done in as many ways as possible with funky characters"

Are you sure you're not talking about Perl here? Because there are very few "funky characters" in Ruby and code written in it tends to be very readable, more so than Python in many cases.

I agree with OP. While Python is not a bad language, Ruby is a better language in general, and I'm reminded of it every time I have to work in Python (which is pretty often nowadays, due to Python's dominance in ML ).

I can give many examples as to why, but here's a quick toy example to show off the difference in philosophy between Ruby and Python. You have a list of numbers, you want to keep only odd numbers, sort them, and convert them to a string where each number is separated by comma. Here's the Ruby code:

    xs = [12, 3, 5, 8, 7, 10, 1, 4]
    ys = xs.filter { |x| x.odd? }.sort.join(", ")

Now let's do the same in Python:

    xs = [12, 3, 5, 8, 7, 10, 1, 4]
    ys = [x for x in xs if x % 2 != 0]
    ys.sort()
    ys = ", ".join(str(y) for y in ys)

Or alternatively in a single line (but in more complex cases this gets extremely unwieldy since, unlike Ruby, Python forces you to nest these, so you can't write nice pipelines that read top-to-bottom and left-to-right):

    xs = [12, 3, 5, 8, 7, 10, 1, 4]
    ys = ", ".join(str(y) for y in sorted(x for x in xs if x % 2 != 0))

And this matches my experience pretty well. Things I can do in Ruby in one line usually take two or three lines in Python, are more awkward to write and are less readable.