Here's my take. Ruby essentially stole the thunder from Perl and PHP as the language for back-end development with Rails. But with Django, Python pretty quickl

Here's my take. Ruby essentially stole the thunder from Perl and PHP as the language for back-end development with Rails. But with Django, Python pretty quickly had a more or less equivalent web framework. Here's my recounting of history: - For about a decade, Rails remained one step ahead on the cutting edge of web development. Thought leaders like 37 Signals / Basecamp constantly rolled out innovations through Rails, appealing to the most forward-thinking web devs. But Python was never far behind. - I would also argue that Python is an easier to understand language. Ruby encouraged the development of DSLs with its second-class functions / block syntax, but Python tried hard to keep its core language simple and emphasized explicitness. - Meanwhile, the simplicity of Python's syntax made it very appealing for developing data tooling, competing with a bunch of expensive proprietary tools, like MATLAB. This exploded Python's userbase. During this period, I would say Ruby was the hotter language for startups, but Python had a bigger userbase, as the more middle-brow option. Starting around 2015, both languages started to see other languages encroach on their web dev moat. Node was better suited for simple microservice APIs. People got into typed programming for its perceived advantages. Compiled languages took on a lot of the high-performance systems.