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Comment by newaccount74 | Hacker News Reader

Python is so much bigger than Ruby. It's not just machine learning. There's also numpy and Jupyter for the scientific community, which are huge. There's arcade for making 2D games. There's Micropython for microcontrollers. There are async database drivers and web frameworks. There's interop for many other programming languages, and it's really easy to make a distributable package with Python runtime included.

And that's just what I can recall of the top of my head as someone whose primary language is not Python.

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Yes, it is only machine learning. Trying to separate it from the scientific community is creating a wall that does not exist. Besides, barely anyone uses python for 2d games or microcontrollers (out of hobbyist programs, and ruby also has a stack there with mruby or dragonruby, which have professional adoption mostly in japan), and you can't say with a straight face that python is a meaningful player in the Web application space, beyond its niche (and async python is a s**show).

> Yes, it is only machine learning. Trying to separate it from the scientific community is creating a wall that does not exist.

What? 99% of science has nothing to do with machine learning. Jupyter is used in a million different environments such as pure mathematics or computational chemistry where machine learning is almost completely absent.

> and you can't say with a straight face that python is a meaningful player in the Web application space, beyond its niche

According to the 2023 Stack Overflow Developer Survey[1], Django is more than twice as widely used as Ruby on Rails.

[1] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/

> I didn't mean as it's the same thing, I meant there's significant overlap across the ecosystem for both. The most obvious example is numpy, and the role of narray as an almost native type.

> According to the 2023 Stack Overflow Developer Survey[1], Django is more than twice as widely used as Ruby on Rails.

Even I'd consider SO surveys relevant, it'd still be a niche, just a bigger niche than rails.

Most people are not going to run into most of those, whether or not they use Python. They are niches. Sure, Python is more widespread, but it's still only one of many.

"Nobody" uses Python for 2D games. "Nobody" uses Ruby either, but there's Dragonruby (write once, deploy to Windows, Mac, Linux, Web Assembly, iOS, Android, Nintendo Switch, XBOX One, and PS4).

There's interop for many other programming languages, including several options for embedding Python code in Ruby (and the reverse). I've come across Ruby embedded more places than I've come across embedded Python (the number of companies I've come across both are in the single digits).

But ultimately it doesn't matter. If you pick jobs based on currently used languages rather than what you want to work on, you're painting yourself into a corner with either language.

Yeah sure you can, you can do pretty much anything in any language nowadays anyways, it doesn't mean that its going to be the industry standard. Even Ruby has DragonRuby for games (but not too popular either)

For games, none of the big engines are python or ruby based and Micropython is more of a Python dialect to me with some partial compatibility, you can't just pip install what you want.

Learning those specific environments and stacks will take more effort than learning however much Python is necessary for them.

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