Has Python killed Ruby?

That is open to disagreement. I will say the same, but of python.

HOWEVER, among the languages that put "aesthetically pleasant" as part of the charm, I think is safe to say that python/ruby are from the top 5.

Any of both will be a good choice using that criteria (and even considering the troubles with BOTH), so in my mind is hard to go "wrong" with any of them. Both have other features that could weight in the choice, but at level of language are more brothers in spirit than enemies.

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I don't see ruby "killing" python, (I'm more a fan of python, ok?); just for the look of it the niches of both are more defined now.

SADLY, js is what is killing all the other languages in the web space. I wish a better language was the cause, but not, must be the far worse, more terrible, but the NON-choice.

Ruby on Rails was a eye openner (my exposure to web was ASP classic (auch!!!) and ASP.NET (auch!!)) and the tutorial of

http://poignant.guide/

Was something good. I choose later python just because I think is a better overall language, but I have always read what the other side have to say. I will not hate to work on ruby, in contrast to, let say, js or java.

Not hate a language is probably a more nice thing that just like it ;)

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You must balance much more that just the superficial aspect of the syntax, despite that I agree syntax MATTER A LOT. With time the superficial syntax will become a more deeper aspect of the experience (when you truly understand the language and see the semantic behind the words), but the ecosystem, the thing you plan to build, how well you absorb the knowledge, etc are also important.

Even when 2 languages look "nice" is possible that down the road one be "better" in your mind and other "harder" or the opposite. For example I get lost reading C-like languages and get easy Pascal-like language for the same thing and the same level of difficult.

For example, I read

http://learnyouahaskell.com/

And I loved it, but I can't make haskell work for real (to me). The language look nice at first, but it not "connect" to me. Instead I get F#.

I wrote a small Rails project a while back and along with it small non-Rails utility that made used a couple of generic modules (mail, config). Both the Rails project and the utility bit-rotted faster than anything anything that I ever written. Ruby, the language, is pleasant, and you can write beautiful, terse, expressive code. Functional constructs are nice, etc. Soured me on Ruby, I am afraid. I liked Perl too, and Ruby is not that different.

Python... I don't care for the significant whites space. lambda is crippled because it has to fit into a single line, tertiary operator is weird, and compressions reads backwards to me. Haskell has the same problem. It is nice how you can start with a class, then wrap attribute access later. Writing a simple new style class is verbose. The version 2 to 3 was rough, not sure if it's done by now. There is a lot of libraries, some parts of the standard library are nice.

JavaScript to me is mess with classes being bolted on, different ways to build an object, different ways to handle errors, different ways to handle callbacks. The write it once and run it either in browser and server ignores that version differences (i.e. what is the crappiest browser you have to support), and in general that environment is different. node.js with the async is an interesting experiment. To me it becomes difficult to read and reason about. To me, it was surprisingly difficult, to write a small sync util in node.js. There is a metric ton of libraries. I quite like JavaScript, but to me its becoming complex (as in C++) instead of burning off the bad parts (as in C). The language will be around "forever" due to the web, so that is what I use if possible.

A programmer chooses a languages which is convenient for the task at hand. Ruby/Rails are amazing to lift off projects in hours.