Ask HN: Why did Python win?

Ruby was an unknown till the RoR was introduced. And the reason why RoR was so easy and popular, was Ruby's biggest shortfall - excessive metaprogramming. The automated creation of all of the CRUD operations was definitely a kick in the... of Java and many other languages that lacked such ability. But that comes with all of the readability downsides, when "programming by convention" lacks a commonly understood convention. (Scala also suffers from it, just that Spark works so well for majority of it's use cases)

The worst part for Ruby, was that none of the features that RoR brought were hard to implement in other languages. Others caught up and Ruby didn't get enough windfall to keep sailing.

Then there was the community, that RoR attracted in the early days... the best way to describe it was - toxic.

> how fun and easy to use it is

First impressions are deceptive. When RoR was getting popular, many people who said the same typically showed me an example of some functionality implemented in just one line. Which is not exactly a great case for a programming language.

As for Python - it just grew steadily. Building the fundamentals and spreading. Having strong opinions from a single person made Python very easy to read and understand. It's by far the easiest popular language to use to demonstrate concepts to anyone - there's a very gentle learning curve. The community, tooling and documentation - are considerably better than Ruby's.

Remember that there are really beautiful expressive languages that make people fall in love with... but syntax is just one small part of it.

As for why it beat our Ruby; in those early days Python tended to win the performance comparisons. That led to people using it for more demanding data tasks, which in turn led to more libraries for those sorts of domains. The parallel growth of jobs demanding those capabilities (data analytic and AI), cemented its supremacy.

That all said, if I need to hack a script together to automate some development task - in the vein of what Hunt and Thomas described back in 1999, I still reach for Ruby.

Being default on linux helped python succeed, not anything specific about the language. It became default on Linux because it was better than perl or bash (easier to use and manage deps) and had decent upstream support and an ecosystem around since the 90s.

On windows powershell is still king, python shares the throne as a close second though. Compare all that import-module, nuget, winget, chocolatey,etc... mess with pip! And version nightmares are more manageable thanks to pyenv. Python ecosystem is good at making a mess work well (except when it doesn't).