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by toyg 1425 days ago
> I hope you realize non-web development is a niche nowadays.

That's a terrible attitude. If you want a certain ecosystem to get a better rep, you have to be ready to talk with different communities, and accept their feedback.

Python is what it is largely because it can cater to a large number of these very different communities, which has ensured its long-term success. Compare with Ruby, which became effectively a web-only language and has since struggled to go anywhere.

1 comments

> If you want a certain ecosystem to get a better rep, you have to be ready to talk with different communities, and accept their feedback.

Hard disagree. I prefer specialized tools over jack-of-all-trades. Otherwise we would be coding web applications in assembly.

Your example, Ruby, wouldn't even be a blip in history radar if it wasn't for Ruby on Rails, a specialized and very productive toolkit.

Just because RoR now has more competition doesn't mean it isn't/wasn't awesome.

> Otherwise we would be coding web applications in assembly

Some people write web-apps in C. Just because you don't like something, it doesn't mean the world agrees.

>Ruby, wouldn't even be a blip in history radar if it wasn't for Ruby on Rails

Hard disagree. Ruby was getting traction on its own, as "the purest OOP language you can use in the real world", around the same time Python was starting to get traction (early 2000s). Then RoR blew up, effectively coopting the entire ecosystem. Since then, Python has slowly gone from strength to strength in so many different fields, whereas Ruby died on its ass as soon as people moved on to other tools for web.