> It seems like a lot of the answer is NumPy, which makes the question -- why did NumPy happen on python, not ruby? One of Python's original use cases was as a

> It seems like a lot of the answer is NumPy, which makes the question -- why did NumPy happen on python, not ruby? One of Python's original use cases was as a macro/script language you could import into your C application. Adding python to your C app took a day or so, and a side effect often was you'd make a Python library out of your app's library and suddenly, you could write standalone Python that called your app's code. Because it was so easy to write a python wrapper for an existing C library, by 1995/96 when Ruby hit the scene, Python already had quite a bit of importable functionality. The first serious web framework for Python was Zope, and it came out in 1998. I think Rails was around 2005/2006, and it was really cool, but one of the rubs was Ruby didn't have the libraries that Python did. In reality, it's amazing how good Ruby and Python have been.