I always thought of Ruby as Perl++ more than anything. It's relatively easy to write, not always so easy to look at and refactor later. As to why Python has w

I always thought of Ruby as Perl++ more than anything. It's relatively easy to write, not always so easy to look at and refactor later. As to why Python has won, I think you nailed it, the library integrations and academic space has made it popular and useful there. Ruby's popularity for what it was, was heavily tied to Rails. As that space progressed, a lot of people came to dislike it as much as anything, and maybe more. There are a lot of ways it didn't work so great and those warts made more and more avoid it in future projects. That's my $.02. I started with JS as well, but in '96 and through classic ASP (JScript and VBScript) through VB6, .Net (and C#) then into/through Node.js etc. I also dabbled in PHP, Ruby and a handful of other tech along the way. Python feels like a massive gap in my knowledge base at times, I have a few books to read, but not much in terms of opportunity/need. And the time I've spent on Python, I feel like I'd rather spend that time leveling up in Rust.