Python vs. Ruby vs. Visual Basic vs. XML 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.

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a simple, very flexible text format derived from SGML (ISO 8879). Originally designed to meet the challenges of large-scale electronic publishing, XML is also playing an increasingly important role in the exchange of a wide variety of data on the Web and elsewhere. This page describes the work being done at W3C within the XML Activity, and how it is structured. Work at W3C takes place in Working Groups. The Working Groups within the XML Activity are listed below, together with links to their individual web pages. You can find and download formal technical specifications here, because we publish them. This is not a place to find tutorials, products, courses, books or other XML-related information. There are some links below that may help you find such resources. You will find links to W3C Recommendations, Proposed Recommendations, Working Drafts, conformance test suites and other documents on the pages for each Working Group.