Especially interesting when you compare to Python, which is used extensively by Google, Dropbox, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, Youtube.
Of those I know both Dropbox and Google have employed Gudio Von Rossum, and various other Python core devs are also employed full time.
Overall it seems that Python is much more community driven than Ruby. Python is interesting in that it has several big camps, including web dev, systems programming/automation, scientific usage, machine learning, etc, and all of these communities are fairly self sufficient but also contribute back to the main language.
As far as I can tell, Python has a much broader base than Ruby, at least in the english-speaking world, but is generally quieter about it. As a few examples:
Thanks to SciPy, NumPy, Sage, and so on, Python is extremely popular in scientific computing and academia in general, drawing hundreds each year to Enthought's Scientific Python conference.
Apple's iCal Server is written in Python with the aid of the Twisted async library, the same library used by LucasFilm for communications in its render farm, or Justin.tv's caching engine.
Google has found great success with Python: YouTube, for instance, is written in Python.
Thousands of undergraduates have their introduction to computer science each year taught in Python, even at MIT.
And let's not forget the sizable Django, Pyramid, and Plone web development communities, all of which seem to have surprisingly little overlap.
The thing is, Python's been around for a long time -- longer than Java -- and it's been useful for a similarly long time, especially in the same domains that Perl traditionally excelled at. Thus, its growth was bottom-up: Many sysadmins were eventually expected to simply know Python just as they were expected to know Shell and Perl, and thus being functionally proficient in Python wasn't really a defining characteristic.
In this way, Python's expansion has been more of a slow burn as it creeps into more and more corners of software development. Rails, by contrast, came coupled with a wonderful promoter in DHH, and brought scores of front-end talent and PHP refugees into the fold from day one. That audience seems to simply be more innately talented at vocalizing the cool things they're doing, and making sure they mention that they did it all "...with Ruby!"
So while I'd wager that the Python community is larger than the Ruby community, it certainly seems less concentrated, and less vocal about it.
To wit, did you know that Dropbox is primarily written in Python? And that the same goes for Eve Online?
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 has a very large community, but it tends to be a lot less vocal (for better or worse) than the Ruby or Rails communities. Python is a widely used language (quite possibly much more popular than Ruby since Python is taught to undergraduates at MIT, Berkeley, and other "top tier" schools).
Ruby devs build more web apps and Python devs do more systems dev and data crunching. Not exactly a groundbreaking revelation knowing that Python has much more in the way of bindings for C/C++ and Fortran libraries for statistical / math routines, but still interesting to see this reconfirmed.
See above: Ruby is good, but it's on decline and IMO soon going to be a niche legacy language for projects too big to rewrite, like Github and Gitlab.
Python was influenced by Google and that influence is hard to wear. Until now Python is definitely not community-driven. Also, look at this version 2/3 snafu.
What's most interesting to me is the amount of people that have mindshare about each language. Python clearly has the advantage over ruby in overall exposure to those who answered.
Are you involved in web development? It probably is about equal there, but where I work we have a substantial contingent of people who use Python on top of C or C++ for hardware control or who have switched from Matlab to Python, but I don't think I know a single Ruby user.
If you limit yourself to web development at startups then Ruby is probably more popular. If you look at all fields where code is written to solve problems I'm not at all surprised that Python dominates Ruby. In fact I imagine the difference between the two is much larger than the poll shows if you look outside of the HN sphere
This is the real difference between Ruby and Python, in my experience too. You're more likely to find Ruby used by people who self-identify as programmers and more likely to find Python used by people who self-identify as some other job - but the amount of code each group writes is probably about the same.
Python was supported by Google, one of the most successful and influential startups in the world. Some good web startups supported ruby on rails but none even close to the size and engineering output of Google. Python was embraced in academia and so became the leader in machine learning also partly influenced by Google putting out and supporting top tier libs like tensorflow. Python was embraced more by hackers than Ruby too and became leader in cybersecurity tools though Ruby has some use still notably with Metasploit. When I was first choosing which language to focus on as a fledgling web hacker it was between Python and Ruby for me too and I like both languages. I chose Python due to Google support which proved to be a good choice at least for job opportunities and good open source libs in the fields I care about.
I think this impression comes from the culture of experimentation in Ruby and more widespread willingness to adopt new tools and libs very quickly. Python definitely has a diverse web development community and more options in some areas (like templates), but it's more conservative, not necessarily evolving as rapidly and, like Python overall, resists influence from other languages.
For instance, Haml and Saas are pretty widely accepted by Ruby web developers, whereas Django templates are very popular with Python web developers precisely because because they are close to straight HTML. Ruby developers (like Ruby itself) readily adopt good ideas from other languages, including Python (rack from wsgi, rip from pip, merb slices and rails engines from django apps), while anything that resembles anything from ruby or rails, like some Pylons components, gets criticized by many python developers. It's noticeable with version control, too, as svn is still very widely used by Python developers whereas Ruby and Ruby/Py developers moved completely to git and hg over a year ago.
I am not sure where you get your information from. It is my understanding that Python is one of a few languages used at Google and is used quite extensively. If I am not mistaken GMail and Youtube are Python applications. The fact that they do use Python may have something to do with having the creator of the language on the payroll.
I won't dispute the popularity of PHP, but I believe you are very much mistaken about the popularity of Ruby for web development. I would be surprised if it was even in the top 10. Our view is probably a little skewed since a lot of the people on HN and popular blogs are alpha geek types. There are lots and lots of people still using things like ASP and Java for development.
python. python beats ruby in community imo. if you're just doing a webapp then rails wins, but with scipy conferences and researchers from astronomy to biology putting out python packages, if you're doing something outside the normal webapp you'll probably find a more useful community with python.
I intentionally downplay what Python has to offer. It is true that Python has greater breath than Ruby in terms of communities, especially outside web world.
If I started to mention those, it will make Ruby looks less capable (or I would naturally skew the article biased towards Python).
> While Python has a healthy web dev ecosystem, Ruby's feels much larger to me.
It's funny because I actually feel the opposite: Ruby is mostly a niche language for the web community, whereas Python is now mainstream in so many different areas (graphics, scientific, sysadmin, financial...).
I've yet to see a non-webdev tool embedding Ruby as a scripting language, while Python is now featured in office suites, spreadsheets and enterprise software. Anywhere simple and clear syntax is more valued than metaprogramming features, Python is likely to appear at some point.
Of those I know both Dropbox and Google have employed Gudio Von Rossum, and various other Python core devs are also employed full time.
Overall it seems that Python is much more community driven than Ruby. Python is interesting in that it has several big camps, including web dev, systems programming/automation, scientific usage, machine learning, etc, and all of these communities are fairly self sufficient but also contribute back to the main language.
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