[buckwild]

I second this. I'm a scientist who also happens to program (as more of us are finding we need to do). The two languages I use the most are R and Python. Most of the time, I don't even give Ruby a second thought because it seems to be primarily geared towards web development. In general, I shy away from web development, but I know that Python is more than capable if I wanted to try it out. There really doesn't seem to be any incentive for us to learn Ruby.

[JonnieCache]

There is nothing in ruby that is geared towards web development, not any moreso than python anyway. It just happens to be mostly used for that.

Ruby does however lack a lot of the ecosystem of scientific libraries python has, there is no real equivalent to NumPy for example.

[a_bonobo]

Ruby also has the reputation of being much slower than Python, and speed is crucial in the scientific community when it comes to handling data-sets in the range of terabytes.

Edit: Also, when it comes to computer-technology the scientific community outside of CS generally lags far behind what CS is coming up with - for example, blastn, the most commonly used algorithm in biology for nucleotide-comparison, still doesn't have a proper 100% multithreaded solution.

There is also no adaption of NoSQL or any other of the "modern" data-storage solutions.

[irahul]

> Ruby also has the reputation of being much slower than Python, and speed is crucial in the scientific community when it comes to handling data-sets in the range of terabytes.

If we are talking computation speed, the difference between Ruby and Python is a floating point error.

> There is also no adaption of NoSQL or any other of the "modern" data-storage solutions.

NoSQL solutions are "modern", but that doesn't equate to being better. I am more than familiar with almost all major NoSQL players(redis, mongo, couchdb, cassandra etc), and for 99% of the cases, RDBMS is better solution. There is no adoption in scientific community(or most communities) because there isn't a clear benefit. I neither try to use RDBMS as a key-value store, nor do I twist my relational models to fit into a NoSQL offering(mongo makes the translation easier, but lacks things I need).

[Homunculiheaded]

I have to agree that this is a stellar combination. Another huge win with Python, for me at least, is RPy. It's a great way to clean up a bunch of R scripts into one centralized python file. Makes it much easier to create command line tools than doing it in pure R.