Django was released in 2005 and RoR in 2004. I suspect my journey was similar around then (late 2005), I had used PHP, classic ASP and a little Perl. I was looking for something better, read the tutorials for both Django and RoR. Had a look at what desktop GUI toolkits were available for both Ruby and Python (I wanted to lean one new language), Python had a few more options and so went with Python and Django.
At the same time Python was gaining significant traction in the scientific community with NumPy (2006/1995) and SciPy (2001). Ruby I don't believe had an answer to that back then. I was vaguely aware of that and it somewhat influenced my decision.
Ultimately it was the two pronged (web + scientific) development of the ecosystem that pushed Python ahead of Ruby.
As much as I liked RoR for its scaffolding and easiness of bootstrapping new CRUD projects, over time with larger codebases and teams it just starts to be a mess. Ruby programmers love the terseness of the language and write some of the most ungrokable code I've encountered (second only to some Scala codebases I worked with). That and the magic of autoloading modules which then could introduce a DSL, the usage of mixins that are hard to trace where they are loaded from, and a lot of other magic features that are extremely opaque to parse through and debug is, ultimately, what made me abandon Ruby and RoR.
It has its uses but I've yet to see a decent legacy RoR codebase without these pitfalls of magic, after so many years professionally working with code I prefer any language environment that is explicit, Ruby is not explicit.
Perl!
I think Silicone Valley is, uh, another type of valley.
Any reference/numbers to back this up ? Just genuinely curious about this.
It doesn't really matter though, both languages are used typically for scripting. But just shows it's not really about the "language", it's about the ecosystem.
https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks
Bearing in mind these are probably not even using YJIT, which makes Ruby considerably faster in some scenarios.
When Ruby and Rails started to make an appearance in European circles, around 2007, it hardly mattered when Python was already around.
From my perspective, python was just starting to gain real popularity in the mid 2000s, more than half a decade after Google was founded...
I first started using Python slightly after that time and for years it was a pretty niche language that relatively few people used, especially compared to the other 'P' languages, Perl and PHP. I'd estimate 2001-2002 as when it would say it started to become a 'normal' language and I wouldn't say it really started taking off until around 2005ish.
So 4 years after Google.
Which made my point to the parent.
And apparently everyone's been living under a rock because Python didn't become truly huge until maybe 10 years ago.
When people decided what language to use, it was very much a "X uses this, maybe we should" kind of decision. Still is for the most part.
Zope was a Python project from the late 90s, and had quite a bit of attention and traction in the early cms/publishing days. That brought Python attention, and certainly gave it some mindshare in the late 90s.
Two years later the project had become an integral part of some critical business processes, and IT had to take it on. They decided to rewrite it in C#. I left the company at that point, and almost a decade later I got a call from a former coworker asking for help to fix the system. It turns out it was basically unchanged from when I left, and the address of the Exchange server that it relied on for auth had changed.
That’s like saying that Dodge Neon is Slower than Mazda Miata.
Both are bottom of the barrel compared to any compiled language.
Scripting languages and compiled languages are used for different things.
And you're right, both are slow as hell and speed doesn't really matter for scripting, but when all else is equal, it matters, a lil...
Also JS is still too slow for most things compiled languages are used for.
Which is actually a great analogy for Ruby vs Python!
It's slower than Ruby, has worse package management and less consistent syntax but if you want to use Tensorflow, PyTorch, etc..., it's the default.