I've been programming (when I do program) mainly in Perl for the last 10 years or so. But I've been itching to learn a new language for a while now, and the two near the top of the list are Ruby and Python.

I figure that Ruby would be easy to learn because of its similarity to Perl (I'm told). But I also figure that Python would be easy to learn because of its simplicity. And when it comes to webby stuff, I can use Rails with Ruby and Django with Python.

I'm currently leaning toward Python and began doing so last week. I started with Mark Pilgrim's excellent Dive Into Python and made it thru the first 3 chapters pretty quickly. So far it feels pretty good.

Before I really dive in, though, I'm curious to hear what others think about the choice between these two languages.

(On a related note, you might also read Tim Bray's On Ruby post, since he just started learning Ruby.)

Posted by jzawodn at July 31, 2006 10:29 AM