[bluishgreen]

Python attracted certain types of folks who wanted to say quickly understand the latest output of the large hadron collider, about the size of life peoples let’s say. Ruby attracted live action role playing larger than life sage type of people. Seems people just about the size of life is what is needed to make languages flourish.

[vram22]

Wow, that's an interesting take on it, as well as a novel way of putting it.

[tjrDL6MjB2Zwwa]

This is why I stayed away from Rails.

I did a contract with a Rails shop and refused to renew it. Without Rails there's not a strong reason to use Ruby. It's a beautiful language, no doubt, but other languages fill its niche just fine (Python, PHP, js).

[moloch-hai]

I did not understand much of that.

> about the size of life peoples let’s say

> live action role playing larger than life sage type of people

> Seems people just about the size of life

??

[turtleyacht]

> about the size of life peoples

Statistics folks, data science peeps. Just needing to get things done, and not necessarily interested in--or aware of--programming ergonomics (for example).

> LARP

Personalities, like a Carmack. People we refer to just by name, due to technical agility, charisma, or sheer output.

I liked _why's stuff. The way he left is not how I would expect a persona to depart. There were some shifts in the programming landscape, and it led to a kind of forlorn sadness or mourning.

If I had to list others, Chris Crawford and Mark Pilgrim.

> Seems people just about... what's needed for language to flourish

Folks needing to munge data from CSV or Excel found python (and R, and other data libs) earlier, or more convenient to use; this built momentum as others tried Python instead.

Maybe also academia, python was there so it was taught. Another example could be students learned UNIX and brought it to their jobs. Same with Java.