<story><title>Ask HN: Why did Python win?</title><text>I started programming in ~2013 in JavaScript. I’ve since learned and tried a handful of languages, including Python, but JavaScript was always my favorite. Just within the last year I learned Ruby, and I was blown away by how fun and easy to use it is. At the present time, I’m starting all my new projects in Ruby.&lt;p&gt;My impression is that in the ‘00s, Python and Ruby were both relatively new, dynamically typed, “English-like” languages. And for a while these languages had similar popularity.&lt;p&gt;Now Ruby is still very much alive; there are plenty of Rails jobs available and exciting things happening with Ruby itself. But Python has become a titan in the last ten years. It has continued to grow exponentially and Ruby has not.&lt;p&gt;I can guess as to why (Python’s math libraries, numpy and pandas make it appealing to academics; Python is simpler and possibly easier to learn; Rails was so popular that it was synonymous with Ruby) but I wasn’t paying attention at that time. So I’m interested in hearing from some of the older programmers about why Ruby has stalled out and Python has become possibly the most popular programming language (when, in my opinion, Ruby is the better language).</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>CTmystery</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ll bite on &amp;quot;just a fad in webdev circles&amp;quot;, in case you are serious and not trolling. Railsworld is celebrating the 20th anniversary of Rails this year. As I&amp;#x27;m sure you know, Rails is built on Ruby. 20 years does not fit my definition of fad.</text></item><item><author>moonchrome</author><text>Ruby was never similar in popularity to Python. It was just a fad in webdev circles. I&amp;#x27;ve rarely seen ruby before RoR and I&amp;#x27;ve seen python all over.&lt;p&gt;Python was popular as a teaching language, how it gained a foothold in academia.&lt;p&gt;I remember 20 years ago when I was starting out it was popular for game scripting (Lua was more embeddable but python was also used). plenty of first class interfacing methods to native code (still remember c++ boost shipping python binding generator).&lt;p&gt;Many tools shipped python as an embedded scripting language.&lt;p&gt;Python was used for creating build systems.&lt;p&gt;Not to mention any distro out there ships python, it replaced perl in that regard. Batteries included and being available helped it become the norm for random scripting.&lt;p&gt;Python was big before numpy&amp;#x2F;ML.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kstrauser</author><text>I see what you mean, but I counter with Plone. It&amp;#x27;s been around for 24 years, and the annual Plone Conference is coming up in a couple months. Still, you don&amp;#x27;t see a whole lot of new Plone sites rolling out these days, and there&amp;#x27;s no Automattic-scale company with click-here-to-deploy convenience.&lt;p&gt;Nothing against Plone (although I was very happy to put its foundation layer, Zope, in my rear view mirror). It&amp;#x27;s a fine program that&amp;#x27;s very good at what it does. But just because something&amp;#x27;s been around a while doesn&amp;#x27;t mean that it&amp;#x27;s still vibrant and growing.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Why did Python win?</title><text>I started programming in ~2013 in JavaScript. I’ve since learned and tried a handful of languages, including Python, but JavaScript was always my favorite. Just within the last year I learned Ruby, and I was blown away by how fun and easy to use it is. At the present time, I’m starting all my new projects in Ruby.&lt;p&gt;My impression is that in the ‘00s, Python and Ruby were both relatively new, dynamically typed, “English-like” languages. And for a while these languages had similar popularity.&lt;p&gt;Now Ruby is still very much alive; there are plenty of Rails jobs available and exciting things happening with Ruby itself. But Python has become a titan in the last ten years. It has continued to grow exponentially and Ruby has not.&lt;p&gt;I can guess as to why (Python’s math libraries, numpy and pandas make it appealing to academics; Python is simpler and possibly easier to learn; Rails was so popular that it was synonymous with Ruby) but I wasn’t paying attention at that time. So I’m interested in hearing from some of the older programmers about why Ruby has stalled out and Python has become possibly the most popular programming language (when, in my opinion, Ruby is the better language).</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>CTmystery</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ll bite on &amp;quot;just a fad in webdev circles&amp;quot;, in case you are serious and not trolling. Railsworld is celebrating the 20th anniversary of Rails this year. As I&amp;#x27;m sure you know, Rails is built on Ruby. 20 years does not fit my definition of fad.</text></item><item><author>moonchrome</author><text>Ruby was never similar in popularity to Python. It was just a fad in webdev circles. I&amp;#x27;ve rarely seen ruby before RoR and I&amp;#x27;ve seen python all over.&lt;p&gt;Python was popular as a teaching language, how it gained a foothold in academia.&lt;p&gt;I remember 20 years ago when I was starting out it was popular for game scripting (Lua was more embeddable but python was also used). plenty of first class interfacing methods to native code (still remember c++ boost shipping python binding generator).&lt;p&gt;Many tools shipped python as an embedded scripting language.&lt;p&gt;Python was used for creating build systems.&lt;p&gt;Not to mention any distro out there ships python, it replaced perl in that regard. Batteries included and being available helped it become the norm for random scripting.&lt;p&gt;Python was big before numpy&amp;#x2F;ML.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JAlexoid</author><text>Just because there are people who still use it, doesn&amp;#x27;t make the statement that RoR was a fad less true. RoR was &amp;quot;the thing that everyone was using&amp;quot; at one point. It was that for several years. Anyone who&amp;#x27;s anyone was building stuff with Rails.&lt;p&gt;Now it&amp;#x27;s probably the third option, when building websites... and a fourth option, when building APIs.</text></comment>