> I think perhaps the ruby community was also smaller Back in 2008-2010 when Python 3 was released, Python really wasn't as huge as it is today. It probably wa

> I think perhaps the ruby community was also smaller Back in 2008-2010 when Python 3 was released, Python really wasn't as huge as it is today. It probably was bigger than Ruby, but not by that much. One datapoint (that doesn't give the full picture), Pycon 2008 had 1k attendees [0], Railsconf 1k8 [1]. IMO It's really in the early/mid 2010's with the rise of "big data" that the Python community really became huge compared to Ruby's. > I have never been a serious python user, so can't really compare As an ex-pythonista, now Rubyist, IMO one huge factor was that Python 2 and 3 were developed concurrently for several years, that played in the messaging. Python 3.0 was released on 2008, Python 2.7 in 2010, and Python 3 wasn't really deemed production ready until 3.2 or 3.3 if I remember correctly. So there was a 4-5 years limbo. Whereas in Ruby's case, it was very clear to the community that 1.9.x was the future. Also Python 3 did make some absolutely necessary breaking changes (like unicode), but also some minor syntax changes that made it much harder to support both with a single codebase for questionable gains. e.g. the `try/except`syntax was `except Class, var:` in 2.x, and `except Class as var:` in 3.x. That kind of changes made it hard for packages maintainers to support both versions. Ruby 1.9 didn't have this problem. It was much easier if not trivial to write code that worked on both Ruby 1.8 and 1.9. > typical python "minor" releases may actually have fewer backwards breaking changes than typical ruby "minor" releases? I haven't seriously used Python in a long time, but from occasionally glancing at release notes, they seem to regularly deprecate things. Can't say if more or less than Ruby. [0] https://pycon.blogspot.com/2008/04/part-2-attendance-registration-pycon.html https://pycon.blogspot.com/2008/04/part-2-attendance-registr... [1] https://www.endpointdev.com/blog/2008/06/railsconf-2008-report/ https://www.endpointdev.com/blog/2008/06/railsconf-2008-repo...