I intentionally downplay what Python has to offer. It is true that Python has greater breath than Ruby in terms of communities, especially outside web world.
If I started to mention those, it will make Ruby looks less capable (or I would naturally skew the article biased towards Python).
Hopefully you recognize that you misrepresented Ruby throughout the post, in some parts quite dramatically and strangely; the "Modules (for Web Apps)" section is a remarkable mess, listing a random handful of libraries, some of which have nothing directly to do with web development, some of which are components of others, and all representing only a fraction of what's available.
I also see that you were apparently unaware that lambda exists in Ruby until someone in the comments told you, which makes me seriously doubt that you've even used the language at all.
Googling around for info on a language with which you have limited or quite possibly no experience is not a basis for purporting to present an "in-depth" comparison, nor does it qualify you to make claims about capability of a language.
If you read both paragraphs in the Web App section, I made almost immediate comparison between the two:
* (Django, Pylons vs Rails, Merb)
* (web.py vs sinatra)
* (Beautiful Soup vs HPricot)
* (Paste vs Mongrel)
* (Moneta vs Shove)
* (Psyco vs RubyInline)
I would defend myself and say that all these modules are useful for web development. For example:
* You never had to scrape other site's HTML and parse the elements for useful information?
* You never curious about hot-and-shiny key value databases for work?
* You never felt like a certain function could have been optimized and make your web app faster?
Especially in these two paragraphs, I actually use all the ruby modules I mentioned in those paragraphs (minus merb & DataMapper), and I use all the Python modules mentioned as well.
For other non-web related or modules that I haven't use frequent enough, i set it aside and "downplay" it in the article.
Lastly, no amount of blog post could do justice on these two languages. The best way to know about these languages is to use it to hack on something.
"I would ... say that all these modules are useful for web development."
It's very unusual for a web developer to work directly with RubyInline. It's quite a stretch to classify it as a "web development tool" or significantly related to "Web Apps."
"I made almost immediate comparison between the two"
It's not even close, though. The Ruby analogue to WSGI and Paste is Rack, not Mongrel. RubyInline and Psyco are very different things. HPricot is one of multiple options for HTML parsing in Ruby (nokogiri, scrapi, scrubyt). There are multiple JSON options for Ruby (including yajl bindings), and half the paragraph is about simplejson vs python-cjson, which has nothing to do with Ruby. There are also multiple Ruby templating systems available (erb, erubis, haml, markaby, liquid), but you only mention python templating enigines.
And all of these are just a small subset of libraries that you can have in a typical web app, such a small subset that they aren't really representative of anything.
"You never curious about hot-and-shiny key value databases for work?"
There are a whole slew of libraries for "hot-and-shiny" data stores (there are at least 5 Ruby libraries for couchdb alone) and it's not uncommon for people to roll their own. I don't think shove even supports anything "hot-and-shiny" like couchdb, tokyo, cassandra, etc.
"The best way to know about these languages is to use it to hack on something."
"intentionally downplay" is a bad choice of words, sure, but I think he means "am only comparing web stuff". Most web developers do not care about SciPy. Most research scientists don't care about web frameworks.
(Edit: and this is downmodded too? Did Programming Reddit change their color scheme again?)
Well, I downmodded that comment because I took it as the author saying he'd deliberately left out information so as to support the conclusion he wanted to reach. Which is both dishonest and at odds with the stated goal of an "in-depth" look at the languages.
