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Comment by mjhea0 | Hacker News Reader

Ruby is popular because of Rails. If you're not going to use Rails, I don't see much reason to learn Ruby as in my opinion Python is easier to learn and is applicable to so much more than Ruby.

That said, I agree that the syntax did feel like a hybrid of Python and Perl (with a bit of crack mixed in) - but once I started playing around with it, I really started to appreciate the syntax.

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>syntax did feel like a hybrid of Python and Perl (with a bit of crack mixed in)

My personal feeling is that it's mostly Smalltalk and Perl, and less Python, though technically wikipedia says it inherits from Python as well. I've coded Perl and Smalltalk though, but not ever really Python. Maybe if you look at it that way there's less crack mixed in.

Why do you say Python is applicable to so much more than Ruby? I don't see how this can possibly be true since they are both powerful scripting languages.

It depends on your field, I guess. Scientific computing for example uses a lot of Python. Ditto for the geospatial field where both the proprietary packages and the open source ones use Python. Sometimes, it's not the language's power that matters but the field of application and the existing libraries and community.

They are both powerful scripting languages, but I think the ruby community suffers from a monoculture around rails & web development. Python also has a strong emphasis on web development (django, flask, pyramid), but there are also large communities of people doing scientific / numeric computing (scipy, numpy), bioinformatics (biopython), games (pygame, pyglet), networking (twisted), education (MIT's 6.00 course), embedded stuff / robotics, etc.

Python is much more complete when it comes to math and science.

Rails is a big part of Ruby's popularity, but let's not forget the impact of Chef and Puppet as well.

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