Ask HN: Why did Python win?

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 trend into the JS world. It’s obviously possible to have rich React frontends and Rails backends if you want to, but that isn’t quite what you got with “omakase” Rails.

The other niche was in devops tooling, e.g. Chef and Puppet. But that space moved towards containerization and all of that tooling, more or less, got written in Go.

Ruby's popularity for what it was, was heavily tied to Rails. As that space progressed, a lot of people came to dislike it as much as anything, and maybe more. There are a lot of ways it didn't work so great and those warts made more and more avoid it in future projects.

That's my $.02. I started with JS as well, but in '96 and through classic ASP (JScript and VBScript) through VB6, .Net (and C#) then into/through Node.js etc. I also dabbled in PHP, Ruby and a handful of other tech along the way. Python feels like a massive gap in my knowledge base at times, I have a few books to read, but not much in terms of opportunity/need. And the time I've spent on Python, I feel like I'd rather spend that time leveling up in Rust.

- The documentation in the Python ecosystem is generally better.

- There's more Python libraries, and they're generally better maintained and better documented.

- Python has a better interface to C.

- Python is more popular and generally more supported by third parties.

- Django/Flask

- There is comparatively little Ruby activity outside of Rails and a few cybersecurity projects.

I really do not like Python. I think it's really inelegant. But it's a better tool for getting my tasks done, due to the above reasons.