Hacker News Reader

Comment by citrin_ru | Hacker News Reader

IMHO Python killed both Perl and Ruby. While Ruby is more alive than Perl it's nowhere near as popular as Python.

I like Perl and used it professionally for year and vaguely remember probably around 2010x relatively massive Python evangelism (lots of articles, conferences, lots of messages from Python adepts on forums e.t.c). One of talking points (no longer needed nowadays) was that Python is backed (sponsored) by Google so Python will be successful and you should not worry about it's future and also if you will choose Python you will be successful (as Google is).

View on HN

I think Ruby has declined because Rails was its selling point, but Rails was optimized for the world of HTML templates. Once you're writing JavaScript-heavy frontends and mobile apps, Rails isn't giving you much that you can't get from Python or server-side JS.

A few people started using Ruby for command line tools[1] but the community was very focuses around rails. Also Ruby isn't usually part of the standard OS install. So Ruby stayed stuck in it's Rails niche.

[1] Some listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ruby_software_and_tool... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_software_program...

I think it's standard on macOS.

> Python is backed by Google

For me, this is why python took off. People wanted that lucrative job or receive the reflected glory of a winner, so y'gotta learn python. The rest is just post-hoc justification for why you made that choice passed on as "this language is better because of blah..."

A lot of the justifications don't stack up against serious scrutiny, but are accepted as gospel.

>>While Ruby is more alive than Perl it's nowhere near as popular as Python.

Haven't seen anybody start a Ruby project in more than a decade. Whereas Perl still has held its fort i.e Automation/Glue work on Unix systems.

> IMHO Python killed both Perl and Ruby.

I think you're right.

(I say that as someone who still very much loves to program in Ruby.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com