Well yeah actually, because with Unix you either SSH into the box remotely, or your toolkit consists of a single liveUSB. Real Unix Admins(tm) can restore the whole system from deletion with a half-working copy of cat and no filesystem, of course.

I'm stuck between, "this is a joke, no one would do that," and "who would make something like that up?".

You might want to improve your toolset, perhaps with software from the current millennium.

Infantile humor, alternative facts, and flamebait: the new Republican Slashdot.

The cherry-picking piece of shit would be the one cherry-picking a tiny percentage of the Sun's output and using that to support the idea that the Sun is the major driver of climate change and not the gigatonnes of carbon.

You mean that thing which has such a consistent output that we refer to the "solar constant"? The thing that varies less than .1% over 11 years? Is that "big yellow thing" you're talking about? What exactly do you think you know about this topic?

I think Ruby is almost clever enough. There's no concise way to send a method as a signal to a collection with the intent that it be applied recursively to any contained collections, one can only curry arguments in one direction, and of course there's no homoiconicity. Still, it's almost lispy. Python is slightly more influenced by the C-derivatives rather than Smalltalk.

What evidence do you have at this point of increasing NoSQL adoption? Most of the HN coverage is pretty negative, e.g. Why SQL is beating NoSQL. I don't think we otherwise have much difference of opinion on the general course of future events.

Yes, since the original claim was that Ruby was forcing him into dealing with classes and things when he didn't wanna, it made sense to opt for the minimal expression. One might even do something like p"Hello, World", but p adds quotation marks to the output, so one might disallow it based on that. Note for the record that the space between p or puts and its argument(s) isn't required. For the purposes of writing small scripts it's almost not worth bothering to list the differences between Python and Ruby — print is also a Ruby function, so the exact code you give can be executed by either interpreter. Using a function:

def main
    puts 'Hello, World!'
end
main

or with a lambda you could do:

->{puts 'Hello, World!'}[]

The square brackets execute the previous lambda expression. I believe the equivalent Python would be:

(lambda : print('Hello, World!'))()

More or less the same thing, with Ruby having slightly shorter syntax. However, try this one:

puts(Enumerator.new do |y|
    loop { y.yield (1..rand(1..18)).map { [*'a'..'z'].sample }.join }
end.lazy.reject(&IO.readlines('/usr/share/dict/words').method(:include?)).first(10).join(' '))

This generates random strings which are guaranteed not to exist in the system dictionary, and writes them to stdout. The collection is lazily evaluated, so that we don't have to (explicitly) loop over the generator until we have the specified number of items. Technically, this is a single statement. Also, I should probably say that this was written as a joke, and I promise that I've never written anything like this in production.

It's really cute how you can pretend that you don't understand the context and meaning of those statements. I'm sure there's some mental gymnastics which will allow you to make your choices someone else's fault, but I'm not sure that this routine is a winner.

puts 'Hello, World!'

It is certainly silly to suggest that one has to jump through fewer hoops to write a Python program. Nevertheless, that was the claim.

You did not invent any experiences. You're were sufficiently outraged by the idea of object orientation, because of your own inadequacies, that you stopped reading something that mentioned the subject. In doing so, you somehow missed that Ruby's "hello world" is shorter than Python's, and that in general the only difference in scripting is that Ruby has less required syntax. Not understanding such basic logical abstractions as classes is also completely absurd, but if you can say such things and remain employed then one presumes that you're not in a position to do much damage to anything.

You are wildly off-base with respect to Ruby, and in respect to OOP, "crazy geezer" is the kindest characterization. Ruby and Python are extremely similar as scripting languages. I don't know what you read about either language, but this is an offensively stupid post.

Ruby has a better syntax and probably a better object model. I'm sure there are all sorts of good things about Python's current popularity. Tell me though, can we even call this "2/3" morass a transition at this point, or are we just going to deal with these two separate-but-equal codebases forever? Popularity is not meaningless, but language fundamentals matter too.

Rails is certainly past its peak, but it actually works just fine as a set of REST endpoints. I don't know why you think that the framework is mostly about HTML generation. I'm also fairly concerned if you think that NoSQL is ascendant, dominant, or entirely a good idea. SQL as a query language is likely to be more enduringly popular than the relational datastore per se, but neither are exactly dying out. If as you seem to be suggesting, Node development offers a rapid path to buggy code, I am probably going to steer clear of that one, too.

Ruby is a pleasant and concise language. From my experiences in coding golf competitions, it's usually 30-50% shorter for the equivalent line of Python code. If it had a speed advantage, or seemed likely to obtain one, I would expect it to win out over Python in the long run. As things stand, I would expect that Ruby will continue to exist as a glue language, and as a common point between things like Crystal and Elixir. The syntax ideas and standard library functions of Ruby may end up being more durable than the language itself; Python on the other hand has had far less influence on the design of subsequent languages.

Dear, the servers are the things in the rack mount, not the ones with the keyboard and monitor attached.

It's really wonderful how you keep deliberately missing the point. The server's role here is to make the files available, and regardless of what the file type is, there is no requirement for it to have a client application installed. If you think otherwise, then apparently Microsoft has damaged your brain to the point of being unable to use a file browser.

I would agree, but perhaps with a different emphasis.

So in our hypothetical situation of needing to view a PDF on a remote server, what exactly is the problem with opening that folder in Explorer and using your local application to view said document? Are we suggesting that one might have administrative access but not file access? If you need to edit a bitmap on a remote server, would you install Photoshop as well? How about TeX files, or OpenOffice?

This is the sort of problem which would only ever occur to Windows admins, and it doesn't speak well to either the ecosystem or the adminstrators.