> Ruby inherited from perl TIMTOWTDI (there is more than one way to do it) philosophy which is a little more at odds with the scientific community
It's at odds with humanity, TBH.
I once spent like two days trying to figure out how a small (couple hundred lines) ruby script worked, because it overrided `method_missing`.
Ruby was primarily maintained in Japanese, so had a barrier to entry for language level issues. It also lacked english-language evangelists and university presence.
When Ruby was new (invented 1995) Python had some older design issues (as it was 6 years older) however it really recovered and implemented a lot of change through Python 2 (2000) and python 3 (2008). Though there were compatability issues in the short term in the long term this change worked out.
Ruby inherited from perl TIMTOWTDI (there is more than one way to do it) philosophy which is a little more at odds with the scientific community