Python vs. Ruby vs. SQL vs. TLA+ Comparison Chart

Wondering why Ruby is so popular? Its fans call it a beautiful, artful language. And yet, they say it’s handy and practical. Since its public release in 1995, Ruby has drawn devoted coders worldwide. In 2006, Ruby achieved mass acceptance. With active user groups formed in the world’s major cities and Ruby-related conferences filled to capacity. Ruby-Talk, the primary mailing list for discussion of the Ruby language, climbed to an average of 200 messages per day in 2006. It has dropped in recent years as the size of the community pushed discussion from one central list into many smaller groups. Ruby is ranked among the top 10 on most of the indices that measure the growth and popularity of programming languages worldwide (such as the TIOBE index). Much of the growth is attributed to the popularity of software written in Ruby, particularly the Ruby on Rails web framework.

TLA+ is a high-level language for modeling programs and systems--especially concurrent and distributed ones. It's based on the idea that the best way to describe things precisely is with simple mathematics. TLA+ and its tools are useful for eliminating fundamental design errors, which are hard to find and expensive to correct in code.