[blunte]

While I much prefer writing Ruby to Python, Python is just dead simple to get real work done with. It's not elegant, but it's still so much less nasty than C++ or Java.

Ruby's #1 problem, for me at least, is that your small project someday runs into a performance wall. I don't know the latest benchmarks, but last I recall Python was about 8x faster than Ruby when both are being interpreted. Yes, there's JRuby, but that's not something you can drop into a new system and do useful things with immediately (without more setup).

And with Clojure, you get all the elegance and lovely collection manipulation tools you can possibly want, much faster performance, and a huge stable pile of Java libraries (compared to Ruby).

So with Python and Clojure as one's main tools, life is quite nice.

[yxhuvud]

Say what? Ruby has been faster than Python for interpreted code for years now.

Granted, Python is faster for tasks like those Numpy solves, but in arbitrary execution performance, python is just slower. 8x has NEVER been true. That must have been you doing some really bad stuff in one of them but not both.

[blunte]

I stand corrected. I used Ruby for 6 years, up to 2015. I wasn't using Python during those years, but I thought I had heard or read about the 8x speed difference in favor of Python.

For sure, Ruby was slow for what we were doing... processing millions of rows of data was so slow that it caused me to decide to try Go (and the same Go program was hundreds of times faster). But I didn't try Python then.

[jashmatthews]

I think there was a short period about 11 years ago before the release of Ruby 1.9 where the Python VM was basically re-written to be as fast as YARV, but YARV wasn't released yet.

[jashmatthews]

MRI Ruby has been slightly faster than Python for about a decade and the next release of Ruby will contain a basic JIT compiler giving MRI Ruby a significant advantage over CPython.

[cutler]

What's your evidence for Python ever having been 8 times faster than Ruby? Apart from the numeric libraries, written mostly in C or Fortran, Python has at best only ever gained a very marginal speed lead over Ruby and that has been wiped out in recent releases of MRI. Ruby's startup time is a bit slower than Python's but once they're off to the races both of these horses have been neck and neck for a long time.