Having done both Ruby and Python, I confirm that they are pretty similar languages, both performance wide and syntax wise. Python is mainly popular because of

Having done both Ruby and Python, I confirm that they are pretty similar languages, both performance wide and syntax wise. Python is mainly popular because of historical reasons. Not because of some magical functionality it has over ruby, here are a few key points: Ruby was created in 1996 and Python in 1989. Python was the main language chosen by academia because at the time no one really knew about ruby, until its later explosion in popularity thanks to Rails in 2000's. It was initially used at google which gave it a huge boost It is also the go to language in the scientific community. Ruby_can_ become a perfect candidate along side python should there ever be competitive enough scientific libraries just like NumPy, SciPy and so on. That being said, I love both languages and communities!