[spooneybarger]

I'd love to know how Ruby is one of the two most popular web programming languages. I love ruby but from what I see here in NYC, I'd say python is more popular. Are we trading anecdotes here? Or is that two most popular based on a metric from somewhere?

[rat]

Based on anecdotal evidence it seems like python is generally much more popular then ruby, being frequently used for just about any general purpose programming (other then some speed sensitive and low level stuff) such as os scripting, application scripting, web programming, number crunching, desktop applications, ect.

While ruby(usually rails) is unfortunately only popular for web programming (probably because python is a very similar language that out-competes it, partially due to specialized libraries and more stable interfaces) where it seems to be more popular then python.

[mitchty]

I'll throw in my anecdotal evidence as well then. At work use ruby for a lot of configuration management with puppet mainly due to it just being easier to just throw some extra ruby in place than shell out to another script. So ever so slowly we have been getting more and more ruby into our "enterprise".

We also have another more "corporate" type piece of software that uses python that gets... less use, but that is more due to it really being written in java and having performance closer to a glacier. Which is why we have puppet now in the first place.

I've used both ruby and perl for equal amounts of time, and I've recently started to use it at work to replace old perl and shell I have. That and I've switched vm's to rubinius so those old "ruby is slow" gripes to be honest never cause problems. That and having a jit+vm that isn't java on each of our os's is really awesome.

Don't get me wrong, Python is a great language but you are 100% right, there isn't much need for learning both Ruby and Python. They both are roughly equivalent featurewise, but they both take completely different roads about how you approach general purpose programming. That said I know both but rarely use my Python knowledge much. But it does have some great libraries out there for numeric computation/etc... I also know of a few companies that use ruby as their goto language to get failing (java) projects out of the door.

Disclaimer: I never use rails at all, haven't since I looked at it source in the 1.x days. Was REALLY put off with all of the monkey patching they did.

[rat]

Doh I forgot to mention puppet.

[wheels]

We track the programming language that our customers are using on sign up. Our customers aren't particularly early-adopter-ish, so I assume it's a reasonable approximation (taken over a decently large sample of sites):

http://blog.directededge.com/2010/05/30/what-programming-lan...

See also:

http://www.indeed.com/jobanalytics/jobtrends?q=ruby+rails%2C...

Or even (this one surprises me, since I figured Python generally would come out on top when not selecting for web stuff):

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=ruby%2C+python&l=

[mtogo]

Yeah, without some numbers it's hard to exclude Python here.

[masklinn]

And, as sad as it is, Java and C# which are heavyweights of pretty much anything corporate-produced.

[powerslave12r]

You're reading too much into the words.

[voidfiles]

You me reading the words right. He said, "two most popular", which they aren't.

[bradendouglass]

Ruby is popular in the sense of Rails and the tools that it has spawned to help us web workers better deal with the web...my 02c