[morcus]

Is being faster than Python considered to be a notable feature?

[dismalaf]

Personally I don't care about speed for this category of language. I just bring it up because Python is one of the most used languages, is even slower, yet that's never held against it. Just seems like a lazy way to dismiss Ruby. Yeah, it's not as fast as C, Go, Rust or Java. Everyone knows and raw speed obviously isn't the point of a dynamic scripting language...

[gkbrk]

Python is one the most popular programming languages. Ruby fits into a similar category as Python (high level, interpreted scripting language, very dynamic, has a rich ecosystem with tons of existing code). Being faster than Python makes it more attractive to use, or port Python codebases to.

[wiseowise]

Nobody cares about Ruby outside of RoR

Python is one of the Lingua Franca of scientific, data, and most importantly, ai communities

Has much bigger community than Ruby

Has much, much better tooling story

Has much better gradual typing story

Isn’t THAT much slower than Ruby, there are far more attractive targets than Ruby if you care about performance

[dismalaf]

> Python is one of the Lingua Franca of scientific, data, and most importantly, ai communities

You mean it's the most used frontend for all the C and C++ libraries that are used for scientific computing, data and AI.

[wiseowise]

Semantics.

[dismalaf]

Literally all those libraries are usable with Ruby. Libtorch, BLAS, LAPACK, Tensorflow, etc...

[wiseowise]

And with Java, and with Go, and with Rust, and with pretty much any language offering some form of FFI. But they're used with Python, and good luck convincing your interviewer that it should be used with Ruby.

[wmoxam]

I found scrooge.

Bah, humbug!