In 2009 I began writing code for a new company doing natural language processing. I was the engineer at the time and got to pick my tools. I started with Ruby b

In 2009 I began writing code for a new company doing natural language processing. I was the engineer at the time and got to pick my tools. I started with Ruby because I was sick of C++ and Perl and Ruby looked like the future. But I soon discovered the NLTK and then Numpy and so I started playing around in Python. I never again wrote line of Ruby… until the later hired front end devs threw a fit of not being able to use Rails. It was clear at the time that there basically was no non-web Ruby community. Ruby was Rails and Rails was Ruby. Ruby had a nice little niche in 2009 but the Python had Numpy and there were a lot of ML people doing lots of math and Ruby wasn’t going to cut it unless they wrote their own libraries, which wasn’t worth the effort since Python and Nunpy already existed and already had a growing community behind it.