Ruby was super hyped 10 years ago. Now all the hype-based programmers are on to TypeScript and Rust... Ruby is IMO at a nice level now; able to avoid some of the worst ideas that hype based programmers like to inflict on people, but still popular enough...
From what I've seen it's popular for startups in general. I'm using it for mine... More YC companies use Rails than you'd expect relative to it's "popularity". And yeah, in Japan Ruby is homegrown tech and the community seems pretty big there.
This just doesn't feel true to me. I've been looking for a Rust job for years, and the only thing I can ever find is crypto scam listings. Meanwhile the Ruby on Rails jobs are plentiful and from real companies.
I speculate it goes this way:
1. Some people at a Java company get excited about Rust
2. They write some microservices in Rust. They're now having "Rust jobs"
3. The company hires more Java devs to replace the people that now maintain the Rust side of things
4. When in need there are internal shuffles to replace those Rust devs
It can't go forever, but as far as I can tell the usage in corporate has started not long ago. You'll have Rust jobs, but they'll be the same shit as Java jobs. There was a study done like a year ago that showed across the board decline in developer satisfaction with all the "new and shiny" JS frameworks. I 100% think that when companies will inevitably start hiring people to maintain those legacy Rust "internal sideprojects" the same will happen. It is when a not driven by passion workforce, people who complete taks and features instead of doing the "provably correct thing" have a go that technologies get vibe checked. We will see which way it goes.
It is interesting that your speculation chose this path: Java to Rust. That surprises me! I would have much more likely to say, C, C++, or Go to Rust. Was your choice of Java arbitrary, or is there a deeper reason?
Ruby became popular mainly because of Rails, which has gone down somewhat in popularity in recent years.
That may be why Ruby is less popular now than it was 10 years ago. Also, they (Ruby and Rails) got popular much before 10 years ago, like around 2006 / 2007, when the Web 2.0 wave was starting. I had worked on a couple of dot-com projects in Ruby on Rails at that time, that is how I know.
And Python got popular cause of LLM AI thing. It is a shame, cause it is quite slow. I had some good time with jython back in the 2 days, but really wished something more elegant (nim/rust/ocaml) has taken over this AI thing instead of python.
One thing is for sure, don't get tight down to one language cause it is popular today. Go with whatever make sense for you and your project.
There has been several other events like that (Django, Pandas and data science..). I don't think Python's popularity can be ascribed to any single event, it just happens to be a language that is reasonably close to pseudocode with an excellently thought-out (I mean best in the industry) standard library. Python is practical, first and foremost. That's why it won, unlike other languages it doesn't really have an ideological agenda.
Zope predates all of those, and slowly as you say people got interested and started using it for other stuff, like being a better Perl.
Python has an agenda as well, Guido has said multiple times it was a language designed for teaching programming, and one of the reasons Zen of Python came early on.
As others have said, python has been popular for about 20 years and niche for another decade before. It's the default non-C of a ton of libraries and frameworks.
Python isn't popular because of LLM's. Python is used for LLM's because it's popular. You can replace LLM in that with dozens of other labels and it's still true.
Before AI, Python was still extremely popular for any sort of data science (possibly because of numpy first, then pandas, but I don't claim any historical knowledge here). And independent to that it was, before the raise of server side JS, one of the most popular server side web languages (probably still is).
Also around the mid '00 it started replacing perl as the unix scripting language of choice.
Saw your comment earlier, soon after you posted it, and was not going to reply, because others had already done so, but on second thought, I decided to reply, because I realised I had something more to add, that others had not mentioned (much):
>And Python got popular cause of LLM AI thing.
Python got wildly, maybe exponentially more popular because of LLM AI thing (sic), but only in the last few years.
There, fixed that for you.
Much before that, Python was already quite popular for a long time (although it was slow to take off initially), and was used in a lot of areas, including web dev - Django (Disqus, Instagram?), Flask, TurboGears, Pyramid, Tornado (FriendFeed), Zope, Plone, and many more web frameworks, and apps built on them, PDF generation (ReportLab, more), scientific programming (Numeric, NumPy, SciPy, more), data science, ActiveState, system administration (e.g. on some Linuxes, at least Ubuntu, IIRC), and even GUI app development (PyQt, Tkinter, wxPython). I read somewhere, quite a while back, that the Dropbox GUI clients on both windows and Linux, maybe on Mac OS too, were written using Python and wxPython.
Google some of those project names, and see the start dates of those projects. That will give you a clue about how long it has been in use.
Google was using Python a lot from many years back, on the front end of its web properties, apart from other uses that I would not know about.
And tons of startups and corporates used Python from long back, and still do.
I know some of these things, because I have worked with Python from a long time, starting with v1.5, with light use, and with heavier use from v2.0 or so.