Ask HN: why most startups use ruby and rails?

Python/Django had a very small community in my local area (Dallas, TX) while the local Rubyists were more plentiful, not to mention very welcoming. I got some early mentors that helped me get going and that got me to stick it out with Rails.

These days, I see more similarities than differences between Python and Ruby. It's like choosing between Vim and Emacs. Both sides have their value, but the bigger difference really exists between a text editor and an IDE like Eclipse or Visual Studio.

My advice is to try both, and see which one appeals to you more. Focus on it for a few months and find mentors to help you through it.

The harder choice would be to pick something like Node.js which is just starting to hit its stride, or Golang which is really just starting to pick up. Keep in mind, it's quite common for startups using Django or Rails to augment their stack with either Node.js or Go to solve certain problems that don't fit nicely into either Ruby or Python.

But I personally didn't find Ruby hard to learn, and in fact I found it pretty intuitive.

The metaprogramming in Ruby allows for the creation of intuitive DSLs and APIs that are more difficult to achieve in other languages. While this can lead to a lot of the "Rails magic" that is often used without understanding, it can be highly productive for folks that really know it.

Beyond that, I honestly don't think there's much difference between the two. Certainly not enough of a difference to agonize over the choice.

The choice worth agonizing over more is whether you want a full framework or if you want to cobble together a toolkit of libraries to build your app. This choice exists regardless of language. I know many Python devs that won't touch Django and prefer Flask for everything.

This is the kind of stuff that used to start flamewars on Usenet ha. I respect your personal opinion, but just to put a different opinion (mine) out there: I find Python very opinionated and feels kind of "old" (like, when was the last time an OO language required you to provide a reference to the object as a parameter within the methods?).

Also in my opinion, even now in 2014 it is still not clear what version of Python should people use 2.x or 3?, given that there is still a bunch of code out there that is not compatible with 3 (granted, there are tools to convert that code, but that makes just an additional step to do compared to just using Ruby).

All in all, these are just opinions. Both of the stands are very respectable, but I wanted to put this out to compare with your opinion. I don't use Rails, even though I use ruby a lot, so on those frameworks I cannot comment.

And, the vast majority of interview processes are rarely measurably accurate at preventing false positives AND false negatives, most tend to sacrifice the later for preventing the former.

I'd be more impressed if someone ran PC-BSD zfs on a homemade laptop.

(Disclaimer: written on a hackable non-Retina MBP, not that it matters. 2 SSDs + 16 GiB in 13")

The runtime is also extremely bloated. To run one fairly simple web application with a handful of users, Rails uses well over 500 MB. I have no idea what it could possibly be doing with that much memory -- is it trying to make a separate object for every pixel? Startup for Ruby apps often takes over a minute.

Ruby is Rails. It's hard to find information about using Ruby for non-Rails projects. So as a beginner, not only do you have Ruby's weirdness to deal with, you're often fighting the number of moving parts in a modern web application.

Also, "magic." I haven't used Rails enough to know about this, but I hear "magic" is common, e.g. (I've heard) Rake uses some horrible hack to monkey patch the lexer or somesuch so it can have its own syntax. This kind of thing leads to code that's even harder to understand because you now have non-local dependencies. To be fair, Python also allows monkey patching, but also has a strong "don't-do-that" cultural norm.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5872899