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Ruby was never similar in popularity to Python. It was just a fad in webdev circles. I've rarely seen ruby before RoR and I've seen python all over. Python was

Ruby was never similar in popularity to Python. It was just a fad in webdev circles. I've rarely seen ruby before RoR and I've seen python all over. Python was popular as a teaching language, how it gained a foothold in academia. I remember 20 years ago when I was starting out it was popular for game scripting (Lua was more embeddable but python was also used). plenty of first class interfacing methods to native code (still remember c++ boost shipping python binding generator). Many tools shipped python as an embedded scripting language. Python was used for creating build systems. Not to mention any distro out there ships python, it replaced perl in that regard. Batteries included and being available helped it become the norm for random scripting. Python was big before numpy/ML.

cutler 3y ago
You're forgetting the period of Ruby's popularity in the devops world, especially Chef and Puppet.
- local_person 3y ago
  [dead]
- rcarmo 3y ago
  Puppet was pretty awesome. We used it to maintain and provision nearly every kind of software across a few thousand machines, even though it had a worrying tendency to remove user accounts (we once got locked out of the master...)
- moonchrome 3y ago
  I think that's just building on RoR hype in that same field. Puppet even moved away from Ruby AFAIK.
  - cutler 3y ago
    I beg to differ. Most sysadmins I knew who used Ruby extensively had never touched Rails. There's no real connection between the two phenomena other than the language.
- raziel2p 3y ago
  Puppet was just built with Ruby (and later re-written, I think?), in all my years interacting with it I never actually wrote any Ruby. Chef you obviously had to, but my impression is that the DSL is so extensive you might as well be writing something that's not Ruby. Maybe this says something about the power of Ruby, but I don't feel like these tools contributed to the language's popularity or ecosystem - definitely not the way RoR did.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    > my impression is that the DSL is so extensive you might as well be writing something that's not Ruby. This is just how Ruby is. It's designed around the idea of building DSLs, so writing in Ruby is almost always an exercise in writing in one DSL or another.
    - cvak 3y ago
      I've spent year and a half writing chef as my first "programming" job, like 6 years ago. I learned almost 0 ruby, and that's probably why ruby didn't stick that much.
      - lolinder 3y ago
        Yeah, I suspect this might be one reason why Ruby hasn't gained as much traction as others: knowledge doesn't translate well between frameworks, so there's little advantage to re-using the same language for a new project (unless it's a new project in the framework you're already comfortable with).
CTmystery 3y ago
I'll bite on "just a fad in webdev circles", in case you are serious and not trolling. Railsworld is celebrating the 20th anniversary of Rails this year. As I'm sure you know, Rails is built on Ruby. 20 years does not fit my definition of fad.
- adamrezich 3y ago
  I don't think moonchrome was disparaging Rails or minimizing its popularity, but, rather pointing out that Ruby is only as popular as it is because of webdev, because of Rails (and the Rails-likes that came after)—outside of that specific niche, it's not very commonly used just about anywhere else, especially when compared to Python.
  - Lutger 3y ago
    Chef and puppet are fairly big ones though. Other than config management, I think this is true. Rails is king in ruby land.
  - eric-hu 3y ago
    Homebrew, the macOS dependency manager, and Cocoapods, the Swift and objective C package manager, are both written in Ruby.
- ysavir 3y ago
  I think they meant back before either Ruby or Python hit their stride, not afterwards.
- tetha 3y ago
  Mh. Honestly, I've encountered ruby in about 3 primary ways. RoR and Sinatra, which are kinda the same webdev thing, and Chef as a config management. There are additional things, but more supporting things - Rake and Capistrano as deployment systems, Berkshelf and such as supporting things. Outside of this, it's been perl and python, with python replacing perl after that whole perl 6 fiasco while the language and distros started understanding packaging python.
- kstrauser 3y ago
WhyCause 3y ago
> Many tools shipped python as an embedded scripting language. I had dabbled with Python before encountering it (in its embedded form), but once I started using it inside ESRI's ArcGIS software, it became my go to language for many, many tasks.
EdwardDiego 3y ago
When I first looked into Ruby, pre-RoR, but only just, the stdlib docs (in English) were a gaping void compared to the Python docs. Would have been around early Python 2 days, 2.3 I think.
KaiserPro 3y ago
I first bumped into python because mailman was written in it. It was a large, slow and a bit funny. I saw it as another odd academic language that had spilled out of a university somewhere. Then in about 2005 I heard about zope, and how easy and wonderful it was compared to php. But it was slow and memory heavy. In about 2008 more and more stuff started getting python bindings, specifically in VFX (where I was working). There was a tussle between javascript and python, and python won out, even displacing MEL and other domain specific languages. Ruby was always more obscure to me, it was for people that likes C and wanted a more perl-y version of it, but without the anachy or the universality of CPAN. I think the biggest reason was that it had loads of stuff in the standard lib, way more than anything else at the time. Much more than perl, so it meant that things were a bit more "portable". So people came for the stdlib, then started adding things to it because they'd spent all that time learning it.

cutler 3y ago

You're forgetting the period of Ruby's popularity in the devops world, especially Chef and Puppet.

local_person 3y ago
[dead]
rcarmo 3y ago
Puppet was pretty awesome. We used it to maintain and provision nearly every kind of software across a few thousand machines, even though it had a worrying tendency to remove user accounts (we once got locked out of the master...)
moonchrome 3y ago
I think that's just building on RoR hype in that same field. Puppet even moved away from Ruby AFAIK.
- cutler 3y ago
  I beg to differ. Most sysadmins I knew who used Ruby extensively had never touched Rails. There's no real connection between the two phenomena other than the language.
raziel2p 3y ago
Puppet was just built with Ruby (and later re-written, I think?), in all my years interacting with it I never actually wrote any Ruby. Chef you obviously had to, but my impression is that the DSL is so extensive you might as well be writing something that's not Ruby. Maybe this says something about the power of Ruby, but I don't feel like these tools contributed to the language's popularity or ecosystem - definitely not the way RoR did.
- lolinder 3y ago
  > my impression is that the DSL is so extensive you might as well be writing something that's not Ruby. This is just how Ruby is. It's designed around the idea of building DSLs, so writing in Ruby is almost always an exercise in writing in one DSL or another.
  - cvak 3y ago
    I've spent year and a half writing chef as my first "programming" job, like 6 years ago. I learned almost 0 ruby, and that's probably why ruby didn't stick that much.
    - lolinder 3y ago
      Yeah, I suspect this might be one reason why Ruby hasn't gained as much traction as others: knowledge doesn't translate well between frameworks, so there's little advantage to re-using the same language for a new project (unless it's a new project in the framework you're already comfortable with).

CTmystery 3y ago

I'll bite on "just a fad in webdev circles", in case you are serious and not trolling. Railsworld is celebrating the 20th anniversary of Rails this year. As I'm sure you know, Rails is built on Ruby. 20 years does not fit my definition of fad.

adamrezich 3y ago
I don't think moonchrome was disparaging Rails or minimizing its popularity, but, rather pointing out that Ruby is only as popular as it is because of webdev, because of Rails (and the Rails-likes that came after)—outside of that specific niche, it's not very commonly used just about anywhere else, especially when compared to Python.
- Lutger 3y ago
  Chef and puppet are fairly big ones though. Other than config management, I think this is true. Rails is king in ruby land.
- eric-hu 3y ago
  Homebrew, the macOS dependency manager, and Cocoapods, the Swift and objective C package manager, are both written in Ruby.
ysavir 3y ago
I think they meant back before either Ruby or Python hit their stride, not afterwards.
tetha 3y ago
Mh. Honestly, I've encountered ruby in about 3 primary ways. RoR and Sinatra, which are kinda the same webdev thing, and Chef as a config management. There are additional things, but more supporting things - Rake and Capistrano as deployment systems, Berkshelf and such as supporting things. Outside of this, it's been perl and python, with python replacing perl after that whole perl 6 fiasco while the language and distros started understanding packaging python.
kstrauser 3y ago

WhyCause 3y ago

> Many tools shipped python as an embedded scripting language. I had dabbled with Python before encountering it (in its embedded form), but once I started using it inside ESRI's ArcGIS software, it became my go to language for many, many tasks.

EdwardDiego 3y ago

When I first looked into Ruby, pre-RoR, but only just, the stdlib docs (in English) were a gaping void compared to the Python docs. Would have been around early Python 2 days, 2.3 I think.

KaiserPro 3y ago

I first bumped into python because mailman was written in it. It was a large, slow and a bit funny. I saw it as another odd academic language that had spilled out of a university somewhere. Then in about 2005 I heard about zope, and how easy and wonderful it was compared to php. But it was slow and memory heavy. In about 2008 more and more stuff started getting python bindings, specifically in VFX (where I was working). There was a tussle between javascript and python, and python won out, even displacing MEL and other domain specific languages. Ruby was always more obscure to me, it was for people that likes C and wanted a more perl-y version of it, but without the anachy or the universality of CPAN. I think the biggest reason was that it had loads of stuff in the standard lib, way more than anything else at the time. Much more than perl, so it meant that things were a bit more "portable". So people came for the stdlib, then started adding things to it because they'd spent all that time learning it.