I don't think Ruby is really even in the ballpark for comparison. It's almost a domain specific language for webapps while Python spans every single field and d

I don't think Ruby is really even in the ballpark for comparison. It's almost a domain specific language for webapps while Python spans every single field and domain. Now I really despise Python. It's the source of probably 80% of my day to day pain in managing a complex set of infra. It was just never meant to scale to the level of complexity in which it gets applied. And certain types of algorithms / logic turn into and incomprehensible unmaintainable mess when done using so-called "idiomatic" methods. But as a language, its simplicity, transparent, direct and open design make it highly amenable for this sort of ubiquitous application in ways Ruby just isn't. Ruby is all about incorporating a large amount of knowledge of implicit behaviour into your mental model, and then it works great. Python is about knowing nothing. If you come to Python knowing nothing at all, there are probably 5 - 10 land mines to step on but after that its just "what you probably think it does is what it does" territory.