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I am a Python and JavaScript developer myself, recently getting into Go, but I took a look at Ruby not too long ago and was really impressed how beautiful Ruby code looked. I do not really have a reason to use Ruby, I feel like Python and JavaScript+node.js satisfy my scripting needs, but I wonder why Python seems to be so popular given how nice Ruby seemed. Just came around a little too late?

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I remember trying Ruby out years ago and being turned off by a REPL I couldn't understand (Python's REPL was excellent) and a lot of Perlisms in the syntax (e.g: sigil support, regexps built-into syntax). Going back from indentation based syntax was also a minus.

More recently, when I looked at Ruby, I was somewhat turned off by the use of code blocks as a building block, rather than lexically scoped functions. I find functions simpler to compose and reason about than code-blocks, and found it peculiar that functions were expressed on top of blocks.

Why didn't you read the article? :)

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