I came across as aggressively flamey - but what I intended to communicate was the difference in the communities. In the Ruby community, if somebody posted a really long regex driven scraper, people would ask why it was written and recommend looking at libraries&#x2F;gems instead of writing your own. In Python, it ends up on the front page of HN.<p>Ruby&#x27;s community is very pragmatic and Python&#x27;s is more scientific. Most people I&#x27;m discussing learning programming with are interested in making something, and pragmatism is far better suited to their goals.<p>e.g. from my perspective, as someone who uses programming as a tool, writing my own scraper is boring (other scrapers work well enough for me). From my friend&#x27;s perspective, writing a scraper is a fun experiment.