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Same! I never used Rails much but did learn Ruby and used it a lot for the kind of stuff people tend to use Python for nowadays. Data crunching, prototyping, sc

Same! I never used Rails much but did learn Ruby and used it a lot for the kind of stuff people tend to use Python for nowadays. Data crunching, prototyping, sciency stuff.. It's excellent for that. I mean, Ruby is so much more elegant and consistent than Python, I'll never understand how Python became the more widely appreciated language of the two, especially with the effective head start that Ruby had through Rails' popularity.

stanislavb 7y ago
I guess the answer is - Google. As it used Python and the word was out. Also, Python had been released a few years earlier and so was adopted by universities.
- jhanschoo 7y ago
  From my perspective, it was the was the ipython notebook (now jupyter) that was the killer app leading to Python being adopted for data science.
  - kjeetgill 7y ago
    I'd say python was pretty big in academic circles even before that if memory serves.
- cdavid 7y ago
  Google had little influence on scientific python. I agree python did not have technically much advantage over ruby, but: 1. Old history of using python for scripting linux, starting from mid-late 90ies, especially around clusters and HPC, i.e. where you find applied scientists in academia. 2. A full C API. Not especially good, but powerful enough. I don't think ruby is much different, but wrapping C with python, again for HPC (or GUI libs). Lua C API is definitely better. 3. Communities matter 4. Different people starting to talk to each other more and more, and right timings. First mid 90ies (numeric/numarray, use in astronomy, etc.), then early-mid 2000ies (NumPy/SciPy consolidation, matplotlib, ipython), then late 2000 with scikit learn, and pandas. Also, while I know little about ruby, I fail to see how much better it is than python. Both are essentially the same w/ some minor syntactic differences, and different communities. I have never seen an example where ruby was much better than python or vice versa for non trivial code. I mean is RoR that much better than Django ? I doubt that stuff matters very much.
pansa 7y ago
> I’ll never understand how Python became the more widely appreciated language IMO syntax is a major factor. Python looks like pseudocode, while Ruby looks like Perl.
- SeekingMeaning 7y ago
  Genuinely curious, what makes Python look more like pseudocode? The use of colons? Regardless, I’ve always thought that Ruby is more like pseudocode because with Ruby, I’m able to worry less about syntax and more about what I’m trying to do. Maybe it’s just me?
  - pansa 7y ago
    > Genuinely curious, what makes Python look more like pseudocode? The use of colons? I used to think it was significant indentation, but if you look at the pseudocode on e.g. Wikipedia, there is no significant preference for either whitespace or begin/end. Therefore, it’s probably things like `if value in my_map` vs `if my_map.contains(value)` and `[x * 2 for x in my_list]` vs `my_list.map(x -> x * 2)`.
    - SeekingMeaning 7y ago
      Ah, yeah. In that regard, I agree, Ruby could use some improvement.
    - nnq 7y ago
      - `if value in my_map` is a one off special case - ugly, nasty, hard to figure out how to extend it (what if I invented my_map to have special logic for `in` ...I need to search the docs for a magic method called for that operator ...if I even know for what keywords to search, ugh) - `if my_map.contains(value)` is nice and consistent, easy to search for the code of the .contains method and figure out what it does - `[x * 2 for x in my_list]` another ugly special case syntax, instead of general purpose higher order functions, even in Python while a `.map` method could've been easily added to dictionaries too, we had to wait years (decades?) for dictionary comprehensions to land in the language, and it's another damn special syntax one has to remember. ugh! - a sane solution not involving higher order functions usage would've been to make everything in the language an expression and have `for ...` expressions return lists or dictionaries or sets, still better than the fugly "list comprehension", I really can't comprehend why people like them - `my_list.map(x -> x * 2)` nice, clean, and general. If I work with a weirder list like thingy and want to see the logic of mapping, I can easily jump to the definition of it's `.map` method Most pseudocode is ugly and ambiguous and actually hard to read without special context from the text around it because you're never sure what something actually means, can't easily "jump to its implementation code and read it". Same like natural language, hard to non-ambiguously understand and ugly as hell in technical context where math and diagrams work 1000x times better. I can't understand why people who are trained in math, physics and/or other sciences would ever choose something just because it "looks more like pseudocode"... To me pseudocode rhymes with... pseudoscience! It's never what you want when you can choose something better.
vmchale 7y ago
>I'll never understand how Python became the more widely appreciated language of the two NumPy, maybe? Lots of resources make it easy to get small impressive projects off the ground quickly.
jessewmc 7y ago
I can think of two reasons: A sort of Dutch Disease caused by Rails is probably the biggest one. When one killer feature drives the adoption of a language, everyone who is interested and good at the language is involved with that ecosystem, and it becomes self sustaining. The other one (already alluded to elsewhere here) is the culture of monkey patching and meta-code. I worked professionally in Rails for years, and I really enjoy Ruby, but every time I had a problem or question that required digging into the Rails source I was tearing my hear out. Almost everything is a cascade of hundreds of single line methods built on an avalanche of DSL abstraction and depending on implicit monkey patching and other crazy stuff that's a nightmare to understand. It's not a culture of readable code in sizeable projects, which is what you need if you want to be widely adopted by people who don't primarily write code for a living (scientific work, other general work). Ironic considering how expressive and beautiful Ruby can be.
nirvdrum 7y ago
I don't have any data to back this up, but I suspect solid Windows support was a big driver of that. I used to do a fair bit of Python before Ruby and there was a nice MSI installer for the runtime and plenty of libraries had precompiled Windows installers available. This was important because we were working with some software that necessitated running Windows. I love Ruby, but when I started developing in it, I was surprised at how much the Windows experience lagged behind just about everything else I had tried up until that point (Java, Python, Perl, x86 Assembly, at least). Even today, it's not really easy to run for anything requiring native extensions. You have to set up a separate compiler* just to build those extensions because most gems don't push binaries out. That may be better for security, but I don't think that's the driving factor. You're better off just running JRuby, assuming WSL isn't an option. * Granted, RubyInstaller makes this a lot easier nowadays.

stanislavb 7y ago

I guess the answer is - Google. As it used Python and the word was out. Also, Python had been released a few years earlier and so was adopted by universities.

jhanschoo 7y ago
From my perspective, it was the was the ipython notebook (now jupyter) that was the killer app leading to Python being adopted for data science.
- kjeetgill 7y ago
  I'd say python was pretty big in academic circles even before that if memory serves.
cdavid 7y ago
Google had little influence on scientific python. I agree python did not have technically much advantage over ruby, but: 1. Old history of using python for scripting linux, starting from mid-late 90ies, especially around clusters and HPC, i.e. where you find applied scientists in academia. 2. A full C API. Not especially good, but powerful enough. I don't think ruby is much different, but wrapping C with python, again for HPC (or GUI libs). Lua C API is definitely better. 3. Communities matter 4. Different people starting to talk to each other more and more, and right timings. First mid 90ies (numeric/numarray, use in astronomy, etc.), then early-mid 2000ies (NumPy/SciPy consolidation, matplotlib, ipython), then late 2000 with scikit learn, and pandas. Also, while I know little about ruby, I fail to see how much better it is than python. Both are essentially the same w/ some minor syntactic differences, and different communities. I have never seen an example where ruby was much better than python or vice versa for non trivial code. I mean is RoR that much better than Django ? I doubt that stuff matters very much.

pansa 7y ago

> I’ll never understand how Python became the more widely appreciated language IMO syntax is a major factor. Python looks like pseudocode, while Ruby looks like Perl.

SeekingMeaning 7y ago
Genuinely curious, what makes Python look more like pseudocode? The use of colons? Regardless, I’ve always thought that Ruby is more like pseudocode because with Ruby, I’m able to worry less about syntax and more about what I’m trying to do. Maybe it’s just me?
- pansa 7y ago
  > Genuinely curious, what makes Python look more like pseudocode? The use of colons? I used to think it was significant indentation, but if you look at the pseudocode on e.g. Wikipedia, there is no significant preference for either whitespace or begin/end. Therefore, it’s probably things like `if value in my_map` vs `if my_map.contains(value)` and `[x * 2 for x in my_list]` vs `my_list.map(x -> x * 2)`.
  - SeekingMeaning 7y ago
    Ah, yeah. In that regard, I agree, Ruby could use some improvement.
  - nnq 7y ago
    - `if value in my_map` is a one off special case - ugly, nasty, hard to figure out how to extend it (what if I invented my_map to have special logic for `in` ...I need to search the docs for a magic method called for that operator ...if I even know for what keywords to search, ugh) - `if my_map.contains(value)` is nice and consistent, easy to search for the code of the .contains method and figure out what it does - `[x * 2 for x in my_list]` another ugly special case syntax, instead of general purpose higher order functions, even in Python while a `.map` method could've been easily added to dictionaries too, we had to wait years (decades?) for dictionary comprehensions to land in the language, and it's another damn special syntax one has to remember. ugh! - a sane solution not involving higher order functions usage would've been to make everything in the language an expression and have `for ...` expressions return lists or dictionaries or sets, still better than the fugly "list comprehension", I really can't comprehend why people like them - `my_list.map(x -> x * 2)` nice, clean, and general. If I work with a weirder list like thingy and want to see the logic of mapping, I can easily jump to the definition of it's `.map` method Most pseudocode is ugly and ambiguous and actually hard to read without special context from the text around it because you're never sure what something actually means, can't easily "jump to its implementation code and read it". Same like natural language, hard to non-ambiguously understand and ugly as hell in technical context where math and diagrams work 1000x times better. I can't understand why people who are trained in math, physics and/or other sciences would ever choose something just because it "looks more like pseudocode"... To me pseudocode rhymes with... pseudoscience! It's never what you want when you can choose something better.

vmchale 7y ago

>I'll never understand how Python became the more widely appreciated language of the two NumPy, maybe? Lots of resources make it easy to get small impressive projects off the ground quickly.

jessewmc 7y ago

I can think of two reasons: A sort of Dutch Disease caused by Rails is probably the biggest one. When one killer feature drives the adoption of a language, everyone who is interested and good at the language is involved with that ecosystem, and it becomes self sustaining. The other one (already alluded to elsewhere here) is the culture of monkey patching and meta-code. I worked professionally in Rails for years, and I really enjoy Ruby, but every time I had a problem or question that required digging into the Rails source I was tearing my hear out. Almost everything is a cascade of hundreds of single line methods built on an avalanche of DSL abstraction and depending on implicit monkey patching and other crazy stuff that's a nightmare to understand. It's not a culture of readable code in sizeable projects, which is what you need if you want to be widely adopted by people who don't primarily write code for a living (scientific work, other general work). Ironic considering how expressive and beautiful Ruby can be.

nirvdrum 7y ago

I don't have any data to back this up, but I suspect solid Windows support was a big driver of that. I used to do a fair bit of Python before Ruby and there was a nice MSI installer for the runtime and plenty of libraries had precompiled Windows installers available. This was important because we were working with some software that necessitated running Windows. I love Ruby, but when I started developing in it, I was surprised at how much the Windows experience lagged behind just about everything else I had tried up until that point (Java, Python, Perl, x86 Assembly, at least). Even today, it's not really easy to run for anything requiring native extensions. You have to set up a separate compiler* just to build those extensions because most gems don't push binaries out. That may be better for security, but I don't think that's the driving factor. You're better off just running JRuby, assuming WSL isn't an option. * Granted, RubyInstaller makes this a lot easier nowadays.