[ama729]

> The Ruby community seems much less fragmented and wants to see the language move forward. It helps a lot that the 800 pound gorilla, Rails, keeps up with Ruby releases.

You kind of answer your question you know, the reason why Python is so fragmented wrt Ruby is precisely because it has a much larger number of uses case: scientific (numpy/scipy/panda), sysadmin, web (django, bottle, ...), games (Ren'Py, ...), etc. Ruby on the other hand is pretty much just Rails[1]. It doesn't make Ruby a bad language, but then it's a lot easier to handle the migration.

[1] Yes, Ruby can also do games and statistics, but AFAIK, it's nowhere near as much used as numpy is to Python.

[Argorak]

Thats wrong, Ruby is also used in a lot of devopsy stuff and I've seen quite a few uses of Ruby in other fields. Also, even the web community is rather fragmented now.

Also don't ignore that Ruby has a _huge_ subcommunity in asia that you rarely get any news from, using the language for many other things.

Still, an aggressive push towards the future is part of the Ruby mindset. If your lib doesn't work with Ruby 2.1, it is not considered maintained. That helped _a lot_ during the 1.8->1.9 transition, which was basically Rubys Python 3 moment. The Ruby community managed to cross that bridge.

[rodgerd]

> Ruby on the other hand is pretty much just Rails[1]

Puppet and chef say hi.

[ama729]

Well there is a HN front page story just now about Puppet moving to Clojure ;).

(And Chef is part Erlang...)

That being said, my point wasn't that there are no software outside of Rails, that would have been quite a claim, but rather than Ruby is much more defined by Rails than Python is defined by Django, which is why migration which alway be much more difficult on this side of the animal kingdom.