Ruby seems like it has Perl influence. It's something hackers might like, people who want to explore the possibilities of ideas and abstractions. Python spells

Ruby seems like it has Perl influence. It's something hackers might like, people who want to explore the possibilities of ideas and abstractions. Python spells out everything, it's all explicit, they don't have 5 ways to do the same thing. They try to have one and only one obvious way to do everything. It's a great language for programming as a means to an end. If you are writing code to make software, the same way and artist grinds pigment to make a picture, you don't want anything interesting, clever, implicit, etc. The software is supposed to be interesting, the code is supposed to be an implementation detail that doesn't really matter as long as the tests pass and it's not actually bad code that makes people sad to work with. My guess is that kind of thing builds momentum. Corporations use it. Educators use it. So other corporations and other educators use it. If you start out slightly more hacker oriented, you get more of a reputation of being in the same category of Perl, and your thing doesn't feel like the bog standard boring thing as obvious as 8 bit bytes. And people who want that stay away, and the ecosystems separate themselves out by purpose.