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by antod 2052 days ago
> In a perfect world Ruby would have left Python in the dust

It pretty much did, but then Rails and Ruby's hype cycle faded a bit, and Python kept going, recovered and found new niches.

2 comments

> It pretty much did, but then Rails and Ruby's hype cycle faded a bit

It was Rails' hype cycle that turned me off using Ruby & Rails in the first place. It had more in common with the cult I grew up with than I wanted to be part of, and made it hard for a sceptical outsider to get in.

Which is a shame as I think I'd have enjoyed it very much.

I agree.

I couldn't stand DHH's "I'm right" attitude about everything. I listened about programming and then he started talking about things I know lots about and I realised he wasn't exactly wrong, just hadn't seen other ways of doing things.

That is still a problem today in Rails. So it is a double edge sword for Ruby and Rails.
You left out Python 3. That lack of a clear transition from Python 2 didn’t help. Despite that, I still think it’s great, but it made it multiple times more difficult for a newbie to get setup.
I've not done Python outside playing around really early on in my career during an internship, but I've never felt attracted to it; the 2 vs 3 debacle, installing the odd tool is like "what" (yeah just do `pip install this`, but first you need to install pip by using `easy_install`), and I've heard dependency management and environment setup is still quite backwards.

It needs a big ecosystem and tooling overhaul for me to be interested.

ATM I'm doing Go, which seems to have gotten the tooling part right at least.

The Python dependency/environment management situation is slowly improving. Poetry is quite good, IMO: https://python-poetry.org/
Python dependency management is the dragon-tyrant, and Poetry slayed it. And now we all wonder why it wasn't done years ago.