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I think Ruby and RoR just didn’t quite survive the transition to much heavier client-side JavaScript apps. Ruby peaked sometime around 2009 and back then, the browser landscape was much more diverse, and it was common to support IE6. It’s easy to forget how much of a burden IE6 was on web developers.

Ruby also suffered from a proliferation of ill-advised programming practices (monkey patching) and there was also some drama in the Ruby community (Rails Is a Ghetto). These were fixable problems and the Ruby community took steps to stop monkey patching everything and maybe address the other problems, but in the end, I think would-be Rails developers started using Node.js, and Ruby fell from the public spotlight.

As far as I can tell, Python survived by virtue of tools like NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, PyTorch, OpenCV, etc. Kind of a universal glue language for people who don’t want to write C or C++. Otherwise, I think of Python and Ruby (as languages) as nearly interchangeable. Python had its own issues to work through (2 -> 3) and its own drama, but it settled in some more stable niches and seemed to have fewer mercurial personalities at the center of it all.




Ruby and Python is not interchangeable, and Ruby is way more powerful than Python, that's a real reason why there is no equivalent of RoR in Python eco-system [1].

Python becomes very popular not by virtue of its tools, but by virtue of its intuitive and beginner friendly syntax. Because of this essential trait the useful tools and libraries are flourishing in the Python eco-system.

You are right that RoR is like a Ghetto and RoR is not considered as Ruby language. On this aspect, I think D has done a good job to ensure that any D based library and framework will still resemble D language. Like they said with great power comes great responsibility, and I'm afraid that Jai will follow Ruby and Lisp becoming untouchable by the mere mortals except only for a selected few domain expert programmers maintaining very niche applications.

[1]Stop Designing Languages. Write Libraries Instead:

http://lbstanza.org/purpose_of_programming_languages.html


I transitioned from Ruby to Python for scripting tasks, with a heavy heart, for the simple reason that linuxes typically have Python installed by default, but not Ruby, which made working with and sharing Ruby code in diverse and often locked-down environments too painful.


> linuxes typically have Python installed by default, but not Ruby

interesting, i wonder why?




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