Comment by Someone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Someone | Hacker News Reader

> My impression is that in the ‘00s, Python and Ruby were both relatively new

They were, but Python is close to 5 years older than Ruby (February 1991 vs December 1995), so in the ‘00s, Python was significantly older than Ruby.

Ruby also was more or less a Japanese-only thing until around 2000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(programming_language)#Ea...:

“In 1999, the first English language mailing list ruby-talk began”

“In September 2000, the first English language book Programming Ruby was printed, which was later freely released to the public“

In contrast, Python was posted on alt.sources from the get-go (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python#Early_histor...).

So, effectively, Python had about 9 years head start on Ruby in the English speaking world.

> when, in my opinion, Ruby is the better language

IMO, its flexibility makes it deceptively simple. Certainly, early users used its flexibility a bit too much to implement useful functionality that felt like spooky actions at a distance for newcomers.

> Ruby also was more or less a Japanese-only thing until around 2000

And after that it still took quite a few years until "English support" really became first-class and comparable to Python. I looked at Ruby around 2002-2003 or so (I was looking at many different languages back then, pretty much anything I could get my hands on), and lots of Ruby stuff was in Japanese or poor English.

That's all fine, but I specifically remember that was the major reason I ended up not using Ruby at the time.

(I did end up programming a lot of Ruby many years later, and for what it's worth I do prefer Ruby for most things now)

Ruby’s English documentation remains terrible, unfortunately.

I can't say I've had much trouble with it; I have generally found it more than adequate.

Early on, at least English speaking ruby had an extremely poor culture around documentation. Code was barely commented and "the ruby way" was to use single character variable names

And the culture of metaprogramming and monkey patching didn’t help.

If the documentation is bad you can read the source, but if you need to grok 3 layers of metaprogramming living in unpredictable locations before you can do that there’s no way to advance (practically).

Original asker here, thank you for this comment. Lots of people are arguing about the pure merits of the languages, but the gap in usage IMO is way too big to be explained by “Python has only one way of doing something” or “Python is multi-paradigm.”

Understanding that Python was established years before Ruby was being discussed answers the question of why Python is preferred for many use cases.

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