Matz is nice so we are nice
June 29, 2024
Well that didn't take long. Zine's back, & so, so is Ruby.
There's a lot to like about Python, but there's a lot not to. I will however keep it nice, Ruby is like that. Python has something of the same sort of problem that JavaScript does, it has a beginner coder problem. Python coders are perfectly good & clever people, but a big chunk of them haven't been writing code for very long, & it shows. Python in addition also has a lot of incidental coders, people for whom coding is something they only do on the way to getting their main job done. Again perfectly fine & often very clever people, but with no love of the craft, & keen to finish writing their code & get back to doing whatever it is they were actually trying to do. No matter how carefully I write, no matter how often I test, sooner or later my code's going to rely on theirs, & boom, bad things will happen.
It happened with this site. I was using Pelican, which is mostly OK, though it takes a LOT of configuration to get it to fly, but the code highlighting library it comes with, & the HTML minifying library I got recommended to use with it… Oh boy. Class attributes added to header tags. The head tags themselves minified out of existence. A hot mess.
So I still have some Python code I'm using, & I'm not hating on Python or Python coders, but Ruby's back, & so is Zine.
Choose yourself a language you like coding in & can rely on. Popularity doesn't even figure in that. I chased easy access to libraries & the monkey paw closed. My current thinking is the more unpopular the language the better the quality of the (small amount of) code there'll be out there to use. Up to a point I suppose.