Python vs Ruby

[Alex Martelli]

Jorge Godoy <godoy at ieee.org> wrote:

> aleaxit at yahoo.com (Alex Martelli) writes:
> 
> > forwards a lot to Python 3.0!-).  But -- the "dream" solution would be
> > to work closely with customers from the start, XP-style, so features go
> > into the code in descending order of urgence and importance and it's
> > hardly ever necessary to remove them.
> 
> We do that often with two of our customers here.  After the first changes,
> they asked for more.  And them some other and when it finally ended, the
> project was like we had suggested, but instead of doing this directly, the
> client wanted to waste more money... :-(  Even if we earnt more money, I'd
> rather have the first proposal accepted instead of wasting time working on
> what they called "essential features". 

The customer is part of the team; if any player in the team is not
performing well, the whole team's performance will suffer -- that's
hardly surprising.  You may want to focus more on _teaching_ the
customer to best play his part in the feature-selection game, in the
future... not easy, but important.


> > But if I had do nominate ONE use case for "making code smaller" it would
> > be: "Once, And Only Once" (aka "Don't Repeat Yourself").  Scan your code
> > ceaselessly mercilessly looking for duplications and refactor just as
> > mercilessly when you find them, "abstracting the up" into functions,
> > base classes, etc...
> 
> And I'd second that.  Code can be drastically reduced this way and even
> better: it can be made more generic, more useful and robustness is improved.

I'll second all of your observations on this!-)


Alex