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That's a fairly Silicone Valley focused argument. I don't subscribe to the theory at all that Google closed internal use of Python was instrumental in its adopt

That's a fairly Silicone Valley focused argument. I don't subscribe to the theory at all that Google closed internal use of Python was instrumental in its adoption. Django was released in 2005 and RoR in 2004. I suspect my journey was similar around then (late 2005), I had used PHP, classic ASP and a little Perl. I was looking for something better, read the tutorials for both Django and RoR. Had a look at what desktop GUI toolkits were available for both Ruby and Python (I wanted to lean one new language), Python had a few more options and so went with Python and Django. At the same time Python was gaining significant traction in the scientific community with NumPy (2006/1995) and SciPy (2001). Ruby I don't believe had an answer to that back then. I was vaguely aware of that and it somewhat influenced my decision. Ultimately it was the two pronged (web + scientific) development of the ecosystem that pushed Python ahead of Ruby.

piva00 4y ago
Had a similar journey, started with ASP in the 2000s, then PHP around 2003, then worked with both RoR and Django professionally for a few years. As much as I liked RoR for its scaffolding and easiness of bootstrapping new CRUD projects, over time with larger codebases and teams it just starts to be a mess. Ruby programmers love the terseness of the language and write some of the most ungrokable code I've encountered (second only to some Scala codebases I worked with). That and the magic of autoloading modules which then could introduce a DSL, the usage of mixins that are hard to trace where they are loaded from, and a lot of other magic features that are extremely opaque to parse through and debug is, ultimately, what made me abandon Ruby and RoR. It has its uses but I've yet to see a decent legacy RoR codebase without these pitfalls of magic, after so many years professionally working with code I prefer any language environment that is explicit, Ruby is not explicit.
- nuker 4y ago
  > most ungrokable code I've encountered (second only to some Scala Perl!
satvikpendem 4y ago
> Silicone Valley I think Silicone Valley is, uh, another type of valley.

piva00 4y ago

Had a similar journey, started with ASP in the 2000s, then PHP around 2003, then worked with both RoR and Django professionally for a few years. As much as I liked RoR for its scaffolding and easiness of bootstrapping new CRUD projects, over time with larger codebases and teams it just starts to be a mess. Ruby programmers love the terseness of the language and write some of the most ungrokable code I've encountered (second only to some Scala codebases I worked with). That and the magic of autoloading modules which then could introduce a DSL, the usage of mixins that are hard to trace where they are loaded from, and a lot of other magic features that are extremely opaque to parse through and debug is, ultimately, what made me abandon Ruby and RoR. It has its uses but I've yet to see a decent legacy RoR codebase without these pitfalls of magic, after so many years professionally working with code I prefer any language environment that is explicit, Ruby is not explicit.

nuker 4y ago
> most ungrokable code I've encountered (second only to some Scala Perl!

satvikpendem 4y ago

> Silicone Valley I think Silicone Valley is, uh, another type of valley.