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Comment by antod | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has been using Python since 2000 roughly, another minor factor (besides the obvious data science factors) might also be the decline in Ruby. Ruby (and Rails) growth in the 2005-2010 era, seemed to noticeably put the brakes on Python's previous growth up till that point. Back then Ruby had all the boosterism/hype and Python was the supposedly "boring/legacy" option. Even now, Python's growth doesn't seem driven by hype the same way Ruby's was. It always seemed to be a more pragmatic choice rather than a fashionable one.

Although somewhat ironically, I don't use much Python any more now that I work at a mostly Ruby/Rails company haha.

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I don't think hype is the main factor. Ruby's decline is due to its narrow focus on web development and Rails in particular. Whilst there certainly are gems covering other areas of computing Ruby never seemed to diversify the way Python has. With Node.js eating Ruby's lunch in the web development sphere Ruby is left looking like the single-commodity Venezuelan economy. Let me add that I think Rails is a fantastic piece of software. Maybe TruffleRuby and Substrate VM will revive Ruby's fortunes. Matz's promises for Ruby 3x3 are too little too late, I fear.

I really hate that Ruby became synonymous with Rails. It's such a nice language on it's own.

It is not just Matz but the community or core team as a whole. Look at every Python 3.x release, and then look at the release in Ruby, some of the bigger improvement were more like catch up. And since then there is little changes.

It is also rather unfortunate no company wants to invest in Ruby.

I think besides Rails, Ruby is also heavily used in DevOps, e.g. Chef, Puppet, etc.

I personally prefer using Ruby for testing & Selenium as well.

Yes, but if you look at penetration testing and hacking tools apart from Metasploit its all Python. Again, Ruby had something good - Chef and Puppet - but failed to capitalise on and extend its domain. Now every kid new to hacking thinks it's synonymous with Python.

Having done both Ruby and Python, I confirm that they are pretty similar languages, both performance wide and syntax wise.

Python is mainly popular because of historical reasons. Not because of some magical functionality it has over ruby, here are a few key points:

Ruby was created in 1996 and Python in 1989. Python was the main language chosen by academia because at the time no one really knew about ruby, until its later explosion in popularity thanks to Rails in 2000's.

It was initially used at google which gave it a huge boost

It is also the go to language in the scientific community.

Ruby_can_ become a perfect candidate along side python should there ever be competitive enough scientific libraries just like NumPy, SciPy and so on.

That being said, I love both languages and communities!

Ruby suffers from indifferent stewardship. Yes Ruby could have competed with Python in the scientific sphere but it didn't and now it's too late. I actually think Ruby is a better language than Python, by the way.

Ruby syntax has a higher learning curve, making it harder on beginners.

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