[jaynetics]

As others have pointed out, there are many use cases for ruby. It's probably the best choice for scripts (rake, optparse, fileutils, ...). There's embedded stuff (mruby), music (Sonic Pi), cross-platform GUI apps (e.g. glimmer), game development, and much more.

But I'd be interested to know where Python is more useful, apart from science, data science, ML, AI, and such.

[wiseowise]

I don't doubt there are many uses for Ruby. But if we're talking strictly about employment, there's literally nothing outside of Rails (quick search of Ruby vs Python in the Netherlands yields 762 vs 20k hits (many of those are garbage, but you get the idea)).

Python also has far stronger typing story, it is used as a glue in many orgs (just look at Mozilla, Chrome and countless more codebases), there's also an order of magnitude more people using Python which means far more nicer LLM story.

On the other hand Ruby evangelists swear by Ruby like it's the second coming, so there must be something that makes people so happy. I'm trying to understand if it matters enough to pay opportunity cost for switching to Ruby.

And yes, I know that you can learn both, but becoming proficient in languages takes time and practice. Ruby isn't something that I'll be able to sell at my org, which means I'll have to invest into it in my own free time. On top of that you have to stay up to date with language developments if you want to stay relevant.

[jaynetics]

I agree to all your points but the stat stands out in particular:

> 762 vs 20k hits

That's impressive! I guess the difference is smaller here in Berlin as we have a lot of rails shops, but internationally speaking, your stat might well be representative. There might also be less competition in the Ruby job market, but perhaps not to such a degree to offset the difference in job numbers.

In the end, Python is probably the safer and more career friendly option, especially if you're interested in AI. However, if you enjoy coding, Ruby is IMHO the top choice to maximize this enjoyment. I don't think it's the second coming, but there's no other commonly used language where you can do things as easily and so without bending to any limits of the language. The downside of this power is that you're never done learning about it. Maybe people who are drawn to coding as a hobby are more likely to enjoy Ruby than those with more of a separation between work and private interests.