Why did Python win the war with Ruby? Was it purely the math community deciding this is where we throw our weight and left Ruby the runt of the litter?
Why that all happened, IDK.
I write that as someone with a soft spot for non-Rails Ruby (after much consideration and repeated encounters, I kinda hate Rails). But it's rarely the best choice, unfortunately.
Life changing tool. No other tool in my house comes close to what computers + python has done in my life.
I'd reckon the parent's suspicion about the scientific community is correct in that it was a large influence. When ML and deep learning blew up, the academic Python community was in a great position -- you had numpy and scipy early on (both optionally BLAS and LAPACK btw), then scikit-learn for ML, matplotlib for plotting results, open CV ports, etc. As for why Python was adopted so early by the scientific community, I'm not sure. Maybe because it was a scripting language that was also very friendly for hooking to C and Fortran?
Additionally, Python made significant inroads as a teaching/academic language and a scientific/math/ML language.
Way back in 2004, I had been using C/C++, Java and Perl and was ready for something new and useful. I'd heard about Ruby and Python at that point and tried both. Ruby felt too much like Perl for my tastes (no surprise, it's kind of like OO Perl) and while I didn't love the significant whitespace in Python, it just looked cleaner and simpler to me.
I have been using Python off and on ever since. I have worked with Ruby a bit as well. What's funny is that they are fairly similar and I've long argued that the two language communities would be better and stronger if they "joined forces".
But of course people have strong opinions about programming languages. Myself personally, I like Python a lot more than Ruby, but I've been using Go for a few years now and it's my current language of choice.
I didn't mean to imply that Ruby isn't or can't be a general purpose language.
I’d say also it was more at war with node until data science took off.
The Python/C API was easy to learn and use, Python's reference counts worked well for C-based objects, and it was easier to build non-trivial data structures than Perl or Tcl, which were its two main competitors at the time.
(Tcl extensions required manual garbage cleanup, I remember Perl's extension API as being rather complex, and I had to read the Advanced Perl manual to understand something as simple as having a list of dictionaries.)
So many people say it doesn't matter. Until it does.
Python works around it by having so many libraries built in C or C++.
Which works quite fine, until it doesn't.
By than the needed rewrite in some language that delivers decent performance and safety all over the place in one package will be very expensive.
I'm not saying that you should avoid Python (and its native code kludge) altogether but when using it just pray that you never reach that point mentioned above. It's a dead end and will likely require an almost full rewrite of a grown, business critical (and already heavily optimized) application.
Ruby to me feels like a very ugly version of Python. It's like Python and Perl had a baby, and I have very strong negative opinions of Perl's syntax. It baffles me how a language that people jokingly refer to as a "write-only" language ever got any sort of ground.
Open classes give me the security heebie jeebies.
irb(main):001:0> "foo".bar
(irb):1:in `<main>': undefined method `bar' for "foo":String (NoMethodError)
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/3.1.0/gems/irb-1.4.1/exe/irb:11:in `<top (required)>'
from /usr/local/bin/irb:25:in `load'
from /usr/local/bin/irb:25:in `<main>'
irb(main):002:1* class String
irb(main):003:2* def bar
irb(main):004:2* "foobar!"
irb(main):005:1* end
irb(main):006:0> end
=> :bar
irb(main):007:0> "foo".bar
=> "foobar!"
irb(main):008:0>
See also Ruby Conf 2011 Keeping Ruby Reasonable by Joshua Ballanco https://youtu.be/vbX5BVCKiNs which gets into first class environments and closures.
I'd never used Python before but within a couple of hours I was writing code and in less than a week I'd engineered a pretty slick, very robust pipeline. I was quite honestly fairly astonished at how quickly I became productive in the language.
I could be wrong about this (my experience with Python started and stopped in that one week) but the impression I got was that Python is smaller, more constrained (i.e. fewer ways to do the same thing), and syntactically less complex.