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python. python beats ruby in community imo. if you're just doing a webapp then rails wins, but with scipy conferences and researchers from astronomy to biology putting out python packages, if you're doing something outside the normal webapp you'll probably find a more useful community with python.

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This opinion sounds very one sided. Do you have any experience within the ruby community, personally?

It is very one sided as almost everything I've seen about Ruby is Rails focused, especially outside of japan. Please fill me in where you think the Ruby community has more to offer in a scientific environment.

I believe python is better frankly at doing mathematical types of things. ANd definitely has more of an engineer crowd to it.

This is a completely different statement than your original one. I think there's plenty of support for non-webapp Ruby, and that its very competitive with Python outside of web application arena (look at Chef or Puppet for a couple examples). But Python is _clearly_ the dominant language in a scientific environment, at least between it and Ruby. But like I said, that wasn't your initial statement.

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