Why Python over Ruby?
blasdel: I wish Ruby were good, but it's so fucked:  Matz's decision-making process
    He tries to make Ruby be all things to all people
      Lots of confusing sugar and overloading baked in
    I much prefer Guido's hard pragmatism

  The pointless panoply of function types: Methods, Blocks, Procs, Lambdas
    All intertwined and yielding into one another.
    I love that in Python there is only one:
      Objects with a __call__ method, defined metacircularly.

  The culture of adding/overloading methods on base classes
    Many gems do this en masse, and there are a lot of low-quality gems
      Seriously, Ruby might have a ton of new gems for everything, but they
      are almost universally awful. A culture of sharing any code that *could*
      be a module, no matter how trivial, leads to immature crap being widely
      used because it was there already, with a mess of forks to clean up
      afterwards. At least most of them are test-infected...
        Python does come with a few stinkers, mostly ancient syscall wrappers.
    Especially disastrous because it's unscoped, and infects the whole process
      For a language with four scoping sigils it sure fucks up scope a lot
    The syntax practically begs you to do it, anything else would look shitty

  The Matz Ruby Implementation
    The opposite of turtles-all-the-way-down (Smalltalk crushed beneath Perl)
    It actively punishes you for taking advantage of Ruby's strengths
    The standard library is written almost entirely in C
      It doesn't use Ruby message dispatch to call other C code.
      That means that if you overload a built-in, other built-ins won't use it
    Anything fiddly that's not written in C will be dog slow