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by tech_tuna 1326 days ago
It's funny, you don't hear much about the Python/Ruby war anymore. Python was more of a general purpose language and had decent web frameworks (Django and Flask primarily). Ruby's main claim to fame was, and still is, Rails. Rails has lost a bit of steam over the years, partly due to node.js and the microservice revolution, so to speak. If anything, Sinatra is a better fit for microservices and yes, sure microservices aren't a perfect fit for all use cases, but they do exist now and are reasonably popular compared to when Rails first came out.

Additionally, Python made significant inroads as a teaching/academic language and a scientific/math/ML language.

Way back in 2004, I had been using C/C++, Java and Perl and was ready for something new and useful. I'd heard about Ruby and Python at that point and tried both. Ruby felt too much like Perl for my tastes (no surprise, it's kind of like OO Perl) and while I didn't love the significant whitespace in Python, it just looked cleaner and simpler to me.

I have been using Python off and on ever since. I have worked with Ruby a bit as well. What's funny is that they are fairly similar and I've long argued that the two language communities would be better and stronger if they "joined forces".

But of course people have strong opinions about programming languages. Myself personally, I like Python a lot more than Ruby, but I've been using Go for a few years now and it's my current language of choice.

1 comments

Ruby was very much general-purpose. Homebrew was written in Ruby. Vagrant was written in Ruby.
True, but Python became more popular as a general purpose language. For example, Python starting shipping in most Linux distributions sometime in the late 2000s, Ruby did not.

I didn't mean to imply that Ruby isn't or can't be a general purpose language.