[kristianp]

I'm in the reverse position of knowing Ruby but not knowing Python. What am I missing out on by not knowing Python?

It seems machine learning is one thing, that is much better supported from Python, but anything else?

[gravypod]

There is a wide range of scientific computing libraries for Python. I'm fairly sure none of them have been ported over to Ruby.

If you're not interested in that not much.

I'd say the only thing that's different between the two languages is when you ask "How do I write fast Ruby" the people who work on the VM and libraries yell back "Here are N fixes that improved the speed of the runtime two fold."

When the same question is ask, but as "How do I write fast Python" there is a resounding "You write C/++, not Python."

I think that's, in my opinion, the biggest differences between the languages: their community's and their community's attitude to optimizations.

[hcarvalhoalves]

> When the same question is ask, but as "How do I write fast Python" there is a resounding "You write C/++, not Python."

Cython and PyPy get you pretty far.

[kristianp]

"You write C/++, not Python." - That's present in ruby as well, there are a few ways to embed C code in ruby to get speedups.