Introduction

Object-oriented programming languages differ in many of their functionalities. Generally, understanding the programmers’ functionalities and features is essential to the programmers since it helps them choose the right language for the right task. When developing a new application, one ought to understand the technology stack for various functionalities such as performance, user-friendliness, community support, and readability of the programming language. Python and Ruby are both object-oriented programming languages that can be chosen for any back-end application. However, they have their particular distinctions that will prompt a developer to choose one over the other. This paper focuses on the benefits, limitations, and various applications for which languages are suitable.

Literature review

Ruby and Python are the two predominantly rising programming languages. According to Chandran et al. (2019), these two languages have many similarities ranging from support for persistence, shell interactivity, presence of standard libraries, and user-friendliness. However, these languages vary in various features when it comes to their problem-solving functionalities. According to Chandran et al. (2019), language’s popularity and power are based on its benefits and libraries’ features. This literature reviews various articles publishes in the 21st century about the benefits and limitations of Ruby and Python.

Ruby

Benefits.

Ruby is a dynamic, open-source, object-oriented programming language that is simple and focuses on productivity. Ruby supports flexibility. Developers lookout for languages to help them integrate other languages, especially when they are blending front-end and back-end programs. Ruby has a functionality of flexibility and integrity.

Ruby has extensive community support. According to Kaustub & Grimes (2001), Ruby is an extensive community and a development tool. Since it is open-sourced, most developers share their work and support each using open source collaboration tools such as GitHub. Besides the developer community, ruby also has an informal community that provides meetups, conferences, recruitments, other diverse jobs, and continued support for beginners. Summative, Ruby is very popular on open source platforms such as GitHub due to its benefits and support from community members. Additionally, Ruby is user friendly, cost-effective, has a diversity of tools, and it is highly readable due to the feature of embedding comments in the source code.

Limitations

Ruby also exhibits limitations when it comes to its comparison with Python. Unlike Python, Ruby lacks documentation. According to (Van Der Lee et al. (2013), Ruby exhibits a lack of organization documentation, making it less reliable by the developers who have to probe through the test suite to understand the code. It is easier for the developers to study the documentation rather than to use the test suite. Additionally, most web apps made using ruby are slow, which makes these languages’ performance unstable. Nevertheless, Ruby has Hoisting issues. The language quite resources intensive, and therefore not all web hosts support it.

Applications

Ruby is a general-purpose language that can be used in building web applications with extensive flexibility. Some of the applications that can use ruby are web applications, e-commerce applications, and content management sites.

Python

Benefits

Python has had a continuously dynamic growth. According to Chandran et al. (2019), Python has grown in popularity in less than a decade. In 2014, Chandran et al. (2019) placed Python at the most popular languages’ fourth position. A position that Python climbed above in 2015 and remained in the third position through 2018. Therefore, the language has grown steadily and impressively. Among its benefits are; Python is quick to learn. Most developers prefer to learn a language that takes a short period to grasp the libraries and the main features. Python is that kind of language.

Additionally, it has publicly available and ready to re-use code. It is open-source and has an extensive community that supports each other with modules of code that can be tweaked and re- used (Chandran et al., 2019). Therefore, there is enough support within the community, and the code is quite simple and readable.

Limitations

One of the greatest limitations of Python is the lack of flexibility. According to Purer (2009), Python focuses on achieving tasks faster. Therefore, Python’s philosophy is finding one sure way of doing things (Chandran et al., 2019). In Python, simplicity matters more than complexity.

Therefore, flexibility is not too much of a consideration since the language aims to have a simple way of solving the problems.

Additionally, Python exhibits limitations when it comes to performance and speed. Research shows that the python programming language is slow, and researchers are still looking g into ways of increasing the speed. Additionally, the language has less support for mobile development and application portability issues. Developers struggle with Python when they want to port their code from one platform to another.

Applications

Python is used for creating complex applications such as clinical calculations, system scripting, and internet applications. Additionally, web applications and data analytics are the core of the Python programming language.

Python is suitable for building a web application, game development, AI and ML applications, Data science and data visualization application, and many others.

Conclusion

Each programming language has its benefits, limitations, and applications that it is suitable for building. Python is an open-source, object-oriented programming language that offers its users a simple single way of solving problems. However, it lacks flexibility since most of its code is not portable, and it does not support version integration. On the other hand, Ruby is an open-source, object-oriented programming language that supports code flexibility by assuring users of various ways of achieving a solution and has an extensive community. However, Ruby lacks documentation, which makes it unreliable to most beginners.