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I'm sure this is less of an issue when you work with it every day and are familiar with it, but I always dread seeing python in the requirements for something because it means the odds of it "just working" on a random system are probably not great. Anybody else have this experience?
> Python’s math libraries, numpy and pandas make it appealing to academics; Python is simpler and possibly easier to learn; Rails was so popular that it was synonymous with Ruby Yeah, that’s basically why. Back in its heyday, Ruby had two basic niches. The bigger one was Rails. Rails is still alive today, but after the move towards richer frontends a lot of the hype, and consequently the developers, followed that tre…
The python modules eco-system lead to the stake change. Scikit-learn, Pandas and Numpy made it so useful for visualisation, research, old school modelling ML. Writing and saving files was simple. Making your own module took 2 files with 4 lines of code. How easy.
After establishing use cases in Python 2, which already allowed a lot of C code in practise for speed, Python 3 changed everything with a simpler language that makes it clear what is normal and weird. You might dislike [:-1] at first, but you definitely know it's weird compared to other languages, so you can know what to search for. Not true of abstractions in some other languages like Ruby, for migrating devs.
Then Python caught with Tensorflow/PyTorch a real wave of being the place to go. Kaggle involved 100,000s all coding in Python for data science in the latter half of the 10s. It did this at the same time as the LAMP stack and LAMP pre-installed VPS running cPanel were dying to React/node.js and PaaS approaches on the one hand, and big cloud providers on the other. So suddenly, there was not an easy default 'nix environment with PHP to rely on being available so easily, and adding python to an existing server is super easy (and Flask/Django easy to grep), making adding a backend for ML or whatever, very easy too. Ruby wasn't even on the playing field for many of these use cases.
I think a last small impact was that Ruby was misused where shell scripts could have worked. Many people made Ruby cli tools for their internal team, when shell scripts would have been fine - this frustrated some of their peers away from Ruby. There is no difference from Python here, but I just noticed it more.
My primary exposure to python is when it is failing in some way, often when I wouldn't have even known python would be involved (like trying to install something with npm or apt). I'm sure this is less of an issue when you work with it every day and are familiar with it, but I always dread seeing python in the requirements for something because it means the odds of it "just working" on a random system are probably no…
I think it just survived naturally, filling in the cracks left by Java / C++. And now the era of Textual ( https://textual.textualize.io/ ) is here, python may get the spotlight even more.
For the generation who used matlab in grad school and then abandoned engineering and science to become software engineers, it provided a good soft landing to transfer skills.
Ruby is too different; too many symbols and idiosyncrasies inherited from Perl, Smalltalk, and created by itself.
That is the root reason why they diverged and Python ended up with the scientific ecosystem.
This is further evidenced by Ruby’s popularity only shooting up with Rails, when 2005 web 2.0 attracted lots of non-CS people to come into the field with no prior C-based experience, so they learned Ruby, html, and css fresh.
And then lots of things were built on top of Numpy - image processing, reading GIS raster data, scipy, pandas, etc etc - and they're all trivial to combine because it's all just Numpy arrays.
Python also had a very friendly and approachable community from the start, and great docs, while Ruby had its documentation in Japanese only for some time.
Django is also top quality, imo. Similar to Rails. But it always seemed Ruby was only good for Rails, whereas Python combines with everything.
So as usual, it's not about the language, it's about the rest.
> 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-tal…
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)
I often hear this kind of praise for Ruby but have never really dug into it myself. Does anyone have any links to pages that do a good job of covering some of the main selling points of Ruby in terms of syntax, features, ecosystem, etc.?