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I'm not persuaded that the arrow of causality has been drawn correctly here. I.e., it seems rather that Ruby has gained a high profile in system administration

I'm not persuaded that the arrow of causality has been drawn correctly here. I.e., it seems rather that Ruby has gained a high profile in system administration, not due to any inherent characteristics of the language or library, but because Puppet and subsequently Chef happened to be written by people who wanted to use Ruby. Based on TFA, this was a matter of taste. I can't, for example, see why it should particularly matter for system administration whether "‘len’ was a function instead of a method)." It doesn't. But the fact that the guy who went on to write a reasonably important tool preferred to do so in Ruby on the basis of such personal prejudices made Ruby important just insofar as the tool was important, and probably contributed to Chef being written in Ruby as well. Most of the reasoning in this article is no better than complaining that len() is a builtin. I fail to see how Perl-golf style conciseness is inherently more "productive" (particularly when it makes it harder to understand and maintain operationally important software). I fail to see how the crushing burden of spelling out 'import re' makes regex unacceptably distant in Python. I fail to see how Ruby is inherently stress-relieving or better for people who use vi, and if you don't think there is magic in Python that is probably because you have not gotten that deeply into the language. All this is pretty spurious, I think. And if I wanted Perl, then Perl is the best possible Perl, already familiar to tons of sysadmins; and lots of good things are happening in Perl development. What isn't spurious is if you happen to like Ruby, even if only for stupid reasons like Luke's; or if you really want to work with a tool like Chef that requires you to write Ruby. Those are perfectly good reasons for using Ruby. But multiple languages will be used into the far future. In reality, the reason that Ruby and Python (and for that matter Perl) are so frequently put head-to-head is because they are so very similar in their abilities. That's okay. Write what you like.

bryanwb 15y ago
see my summary at the end. The real cause of ruby's rise is that puppet was written in it and that you use ruby-based dsl to configure puppet. This factor is more significant than language differences.
bryanwb 15y ago
you also seem to have missed the multiple times I state my personal preference for Python but am shifting to ruby for practical reasons.
Goladus 15y ago
I fail to see how Perl-golf style conciseness is inherently more "productive" (particularly when it makes it harder to understand and maintain operationally important software). I'm not sure the author made a great case, but it does matter. Unix admins often think in terms of lines, because lines are the default unit of action. No matter how much planning and cfengining you do, there are still times when an admin must take direct action on a system. When that happens, they use the interactive command lines. These lines often aren't repeated frequently and have no need to be stored in any file other than .bash_history, and therefore do not need to be read or maintained. In those situations, the conceptual and physical overhead incurred by something like 'import re' is most assuredly significant.
- piccadilly 15y ago
  I can get insanely concise one-liners out of C and shell, but that doesn't make those inherently more-productive languages. I forget what bash does, but when I write a block of shell in zsh, it is saved as a 'line.' This is a tool issue, not an issue of language expressiveness. If you can't write concise Python, maybe that's just because you aren't that comfortable with Python... that's a perfectly good reason not to use it but it isn't some sort of dramatic limiting case requiring all system administrators to use Ruby instead.
  - Goladus 15y ago
    I don't use Ruby at all, personally. I use Python and Bash almost exclusively. I use Puppet but am not a huge fan, and I certainly have no plans to switch to ruby. I mostly agree with your original point. However, the CLI thing is a legitimate advantage in favor of Ruby and Perl. Python is just really annoying to use for system administration one-liners. A number of fundamental design choices that have a minimal impact on even the smallest .py files make 'python -c' cumbersome. Specifically: A number of common tasks available as syntax in Perl and Ruby are in libraries in python. In particular, you often need to import sys, os, re, and subprocess. Not a real issue writing scripts, but adds a lot of overhead to a single line. You can't pass a DEDENT token to '-c', at least I haven't figured it out, meaning you can't use more than one loop or control structure. You can work around this to some extent using list comprehensions. Python's string literal syntax is more limited. I have never had an issue with this writing scripts, however from the command line it can be annoyingly tricky to keep track of which quote characters are needed. Ruby and Perl both have non-conflicting options for notating string literals. In shell scripts, strings are the default literal and you only need to worry about keywords and special characters. Another advantage of shell are list literals. (I don't have enough practice to know how Ruby and Perl fare in this regard). Bash also has some extremely convenient list expansion syntax. for fqdn in {www,news}.ycombinator.com ; do echo $fqdn ; done python -c "import sys; [sys.stdout.write('%s\n' % fqdn) for fqdn in ['%s.ycombinator.com' % sd for sd in ['www', 'news']]]" Obviously this particular example could technically be shorter, since I could use for-loop syntax (and in python 3+ print is a function). But I would have to arrange it like this if I needed another nested loop. If you wanted to perform some additional action on the names you might have to import yet another library. Incidentally, C can be a useful admin tool if you know how to use it, but usually the compile-execute cycle makes it more cumbersome than it's worth for one-offs. A C compiler might not even be available on your production system.
kamaal 15y ago
I fail to see how Perl-golf style conciseness is inherently more "productive" (particularly when it makes it harder to understand and maintain operationally important software). Let me ask a simple question here, how does one possibly remember all the vi commands or emacs commands for that matter? The answer is no one sits down with sheet of paper and memorizes these sort of things. A person sits down and understands how to use a particular tool, and then later on he just looks up to some form of a reference. Over time this becomes just muscle memory. This where tools like Perl/Awk/Sed and other Unix text processing tools win over Python. You have to spend some learning how to use them initially after which you get very productive with them. For most people who don't have exposure to how much one can push the combination of pipes and Unix text processing utilities its a little difficult to explain it in words. You have to just use it to feel how power full they are. Often you can save days of effort writing lengthy programs and testing them. All you need to be is familiar with the Unix text processing utilities and know how sew them using pipes and you can amazing lot of work without writing any code at all. Perl has a special distinction that it not only helps you do all this things seamlessly but also makes a great scripting language for any task imaginable today. You get one platform for quick scripts plus application development of almost any kind. They didn't call Perl the swiss army knife and duct tape of the internet just like that. I don't think any other programming language has come to adapting practical software realities as much as Perl has. Every other programming language forces you think in one way or tries to force its paradigm you. On the other hand, Perl bends towards your paradigm. That to me is more than sufficient reason to use and go back to Perl again, because adaptability ensures survival on the longer run. A painter is never happy when the brush dictates his art. A painter is happy when the brush paints the way he wishes to dictate his art.
- eropple 15y ago
  Perl has a special distinction that it not only helps you do all this things seamlessly but also makes a great scripting language for any task imaginable today. You get one platform for quick scripts plus application development of almost any kind. Until someone else has to maintain your code. I've noticed that most folks who default to Perl tend to write Perl in a manner largely inconsistent with the next guy's. "Bending toward your paradigm" is not an inherent good if anyone else ever has to deal with your paradigm after you leave. Consistency at 90% your-arbitrary-metric-of-quality is generally better than wild inconsistency at 100% your-arbitrary-metric-of-quality, at least when multiple people are around.

bryanwb 15y ago

see my summary at the end. The real cause of ruby's rise is that puppet was written in it and that you use ruby-based dsl to configure puppet. This factor is more significant than language differences.

bryanwb 15y ago

you also seem to have missed the multiple times I state my personal preference for Python but am shifting to ruby for practical reasons.

Goladus 15y ago

I fail to see how Perl-golf style conciseness is inherently more "productive" (particularly when it makes it harder to understand and maintain operationally important software). I'm not sure the author made a great case, but it does matter. Unix admins often think in terms of lines, because lines are the default unit of action. No matter how much planning and cfengining you do, there are still times when an admin must take direct action on a system. When that happens, they use the interactive command lines. These lines often aren't repeated frequently and have no need to be stored in any file other than .bash_history, and therefore do not need to be read or maintained. In those situations, the conceptual and physical overhead incurred by something like 'import re' is most assuredly significant.

piccadilly 15y ago
I can get insanely concise one-liners out of C and shell, but that doesn't make those inherently more-productive languages. I forget what bash does, but when I write a block of shell in zsh, it is saved as a 'line.' This is a tool issue, not an issue of language expressiveness. If you can't write concise Python, maybe that's just because you aren't that comfortable with Python... that's a perfectly good reason not to use it but it isn't some sort of dramatic limiting case requiring all system administrators to use Ruby instead.
- Goladus 15y ago
  I don't use Ruby at all, personally. I use Python and Bash almost exclusively. I use Puppet but am not a huge fan, and I certainly have no plans to switch to ruby. I mostly agree with your original point. However, the CLI thing is a legitimate advantage in favor of Ruby and Perl. Python is just really annoying to use for system administration one-liners. A number of fundamental design choices that have a minimal impact on even the smallest .py files make 'python -c' cumbersome. Specifically: A number of common tasks available as syntax in Perl and Ruby are in libraries in python. In particular, you often need to import sys, os, re, and subprocess. Not a real issue writing scripts, but adds a lot of overhead to a single line. You can't pass a DEDENT token to '-c', at least I haven't figured it out, meaning you can't use more than one loop or control structure. You can work around this to some extent using list comprehensions. Python's string literal syntax is more limited. I have never had an issue with this writing scripts, however from the command line it can be annoyingly tricky to keep track of which quote characters are needed. Ruby and Perl both have non-conflicting options for notating string literals. In shell scripts, strings are the default literal and you only need to worry about keywords and special characters. Another advantage of shell are list literals. (I don't have enough practice to know how Ruby and Perl fare in this regard). Bash also has some extremely convenient list expansion syntax. for fqdn in {www,news}.ycombinator.com ; do echo $fqdn ; done python -c "import sys; [sys.stdout.write('%s\n' % fqdn) for fqdn in ['%s.ycombinator.com' % sd for sd in ['www', 'news']]]" Obviously this particular example could technically be shorter, since I could use for-loop syntax (and in python 3+ print is a function). But I would have to arrange it like this if I needed another nested loop. If you wanted to perform some additional action on the names you might have to import yet another library. Incidentally, C can be a useful admin tool if you know how to use it, but usually the compile-execute cycle makes it more cumbersome than it's worth for one-offs. A C compiler might not even be available on your production system.

kamaal 15y ago

I fail to see how Perl-golf style conciseness is inherently more "productive" (particularly when it makes it harder to understand and maintain operationally important software). Let me ask a simple question here, how does one possibly remember all the vi commands or emacs commands for that matter? The answer is no one sits down with sheet of paper and memorizes these sort of things. A person sits down and understands how to use a particular tool, and then later on he just looks up to some form of a reference. Over time this becomes just muscle memory. This where tools like Perl/Awk/Sed and other Unix text processing tools win over Python. You have to spend some learning how to use them initially after which you get very productive with them. For most people who don't have exposure to how much one can push the combination of pipes and Unix text processing utilities its a little difficult to explain it in words. You have to just use it to feel how power full they are. Often you can save days of effort writing lengthy programs and testing them. All you need to be is familiar with the Unix text processing utilities and know how sew them using pipes and you can amazing lot of work without writing any code at all. Perl has a special distinction that it not only helps you do all this things seamlessly but also makes a great scripting language for any task imaginable today. You get one platform for quick scripts plus application development of almost any kind. They didn't call Perl the swiss army knife and duct tape of the internet just like that. I don't think any other programming language has come to adapting practical software realities as much as Perl has. Every other programming language forces you think in one way or tries to force its paradigm you. On the other hand, Perl bends towards your paradigm. That to me is more than sufficient reason to use and go back to Perl again, because adaptability ensures survival on the longer run. A painter is never happy when the brush dictates his art. A painter is happy when the brush paints the way he wishes to dictate his art.

eropple 15y ago
Perl has a special distinction that it not only helps you do all this things seamlessly but also makes a great scripting language for any task imaginable today. You get one platform for quick scripts plus application development of almost any kind. Until someone else has to maintain your code. I've noticed that most folks who default to Perl tend to write Perl in a manner largely inconsistent with the next guy's. "Bending toward your paradigm" is not an inherent good if anyone else ever has to deal with your paradigm after you leave. Consistency at 90% your-arbitrary-metric-of-quality is generally better than wild inconsistency at 100% your-arbitrary-metric-of-quality, at least when multiple people are around.