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Comment by vaksel | Hacker News Reader

I think the main reason is because Google uses Python, so many of the top programmers learn it.

Personally, I attribute its use (at least in science / engineering) to the numpy, scipy, matplotlib combo. It makes prototyping fast, flexible, and rivals (surpasses IMO) Matlab.

Anything is better than Matlab.

Spoken like someone who hasn't written nearly enough Fortran.

.. or COBOL

and IPython, it's a import part of NumPy/SciPy/MatplotLib family, offers a great many convenience features, such as tab-completion of python functions and a good help system. not to mention the new ZeroMQ messaging design(http://ipython.scipy.org/doc/nightly/html/development/messag...).

I disagree. I use Python because when I was forced reluctantly to use it, I found that I already knew it! I was simply amazed how far I could get by simply guessing the syntax.

"import flight" indeed.

That was all long before Google started to aggressively adopt it.

This is the real reason AFAICT. Anybody who tries to pin it on Python's obvious superiority to Ruby is just not paying attention. They're not the same, but not so different that one has a clear advantage over another in most people's minds.

Speaking as a Python person who recently had to dig through a Ruby project, I can see why people like Ruby and RoR (lack of explicit return statements make your code look functional, lack of parens makes your code look minimal, it's nice to have "unless"), but it is not for me.

(I will not go into Ruby's disadvantages nor direct language comparison because I don't want this thread to devolve into a language flamewar.)

Oh, absolutely. I'm much the same, only leaning toward Ruby's side. What I mean is that the differences are very much matters of taste — they both have warts, but neither so glaring that it makes the language obviously worse. To an impartial observer (i.e. sonebody who is looking from outside and hasn't "bought into" either language or its philosophy), they look very similar, because they are.

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