My take on Ruby is it has a sizable, active and vocal Rails community,.
Past that, it starts to fragment, but much of it still appears focused around the web app segment. While Python is a much more diverse and widely used language. It certainly cuts across many more industry boundaries and market segments than lots of other languages. I will say both Ruby and Javascript do a much better job on the Public Relations front. As those developers are just better at getting the word out to other developers by building websites to show off stuff. Like Rails was about 4 or 5 years ago, the NodeJS topic segment is a smoking red hot these days. Yet Python, continues to be at the top of the most popular languages, even above Javascript and Ruby and only behind the C's and Php. And with Guido adding a new Async library into the 3.4 standard library, I think over time it will open many new doors for Python folks. As far DevOps code goes it sure seems likes more DevOps coders are using more Python over Ruby outside of the Puppet / Chef mix. Ansible ( an ex-puppet product manager ) is using Python as well as the Salt Project, plus all the folks who write their own solutions. Both of these OS projects are gaining popularity across many other projects like OpenStack. While Chef's client is Ruby, it's server these days is in Erlang…… so I guess Ruby didn't scale as well in big Chef installs after all. Or maybe it's the Erlang networking angle that just ends up being a better answer for those kind of problems I would say for lots of folks that Fabric is going to do the job for you…….. just fine and with less work. Personally I find Python to be a delightfully, clean, fun and robust language, that just clears out so much of the clutter to allow one to just write code to get the job done. When I've visited a Seattle Ruby or Javascript user meetings, they can have 50 to 100 people showing up month after month, no problem. Where as any of the Seattle Python meetings average 10 to 15 and the largest one was about 30 people. Seattle based Python company's just are not as active at supporting the local community to help foster and grow the local user segments as the JS or Ruby companies are I guess. Maybe it's because Python cuts across so many boundaries, that most users just don't show up at any of the monthly Seattle meetings or weekly hack nights going on. Funny that one of Python's greatest strengths of being so diverse and capable, also creates and fragments us into not doing many face to face meetings here in Seattle. Bottom line is when you poke your head up above the cloud line, I think you will see Python is hugely popular across a broad and diverse market. But sadly that means many us don't know each other like we should when it was a much smaller user base. Best way to correct this problem is show up at a monthly SeaPig or Seattle Django meeting. Plus the Seattle Django folks do a weekly hack night every Thursday night. ( that's tonight 5 - 8pm ) More info can be found here at http://www.meetup.com/django-seattle I've heard there is a Seattle PyLadies group, but have not crossed path yet, given their narrow focus. ( more info here http://www.meetup.com/Seattle-PyLadies/ ) The kickstarter Micro Python project now has over 560 world wide supporters and still has 21 more days to go. With a little bit luck this little board very well may open a whole new way to work on ARM based chips for some of us. ( http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/214379695/micro-python-python-for-microcontrollers/backers ) Best thing is show up and be a part of making our local Seattle Python community more vibrant and vocal. Hope to see some of you at one of the up coming meetings soon……...regardless of what market segment you are working in…… -Kevin On Nov 21, 2013, at 10:01 AM, Rohit Patnaik <quanti...@gmail.com> wrote: > I would say that the other big use of Ruby is for system administration. > Puppet and Chef both have significant Ruby components. However, Python is > quickly catching up in that area, since Salt and Ansible are almost all > Python. > > -- Rohit > > > On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 9:41 AM, Chris Barker <chris.bar...@noaa.gov> wrote: > On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 9:21 AM, David Goldsmith <d.l.goldsm...@gmail.com> > wrote: > Thanks, Kevin. Yes, quite an interesting post. One of the things I noted > was that he states that he still uses Ruby for text processing (whereas I > thought that this is one of the functional things that Python excels in). > > Yeah, I thought that was odd, too -- I can imagine someone still using Perl > for text processing if they were used to that -- after all it was originally > designed for just that, but I don't get Ruby. > > Thus my curiosity was piqued-- "what's the deal" (anyone) with Ruby: is it > an interpreted (as opposed to compiled) language? Un- or weakly-typed? > > dynamically types, similar to Python > > > Have a "rich" set of built-ins and an even richer set of available modules? > > pretty good I think, yes. > > More or less widely and broadly used than Python? > > Less -- I think much less. "Ruby on Rails" was/is the "killer app" for Ruby > -- it provided a really nice way to put together web sites, and got a lot of > folks using Ruby. I suspect that most Ruby use is web development, primairly > with Rails )only with Rails?), but it is certainly used for other stuf as > well -- for instance the "Homebrew" package management/building system for > OS-X is written in Ruby. > > Generally, as objectively as possible, how is it "better" and "worse" than > Python? Thanks! > > In the scheme of all programming languages -- Ruby and Python are a heck of a > lot alike, and I think, are well suited to similar problems (i.e. most of > them :-) ). > > I've never done anything real with Ruby, but I saw a cool talk a couple years > ago demonstrating how it has more powerful, maybe-even lisp-like macro > ability -- a way to dynamically change a bit how the language works -- pretty > powerful stuff, though scary to me. (though I'm not sure they call it macros > -- memory is fuzzy here) > > Ruby has a nice system for managing external packages ("Ruby Gems") -- it was > much better than Python before PyPi and pip and all, not sure if it's still > better. > > As for downsides: > > The syntax looks cluttered to me: " end", and more brackets and odd symbols. > Not as bad as Perl, and this is really a taste issue. > > Not as wide a user community -- particularly for scientific / computational > development I used to find Python stuff for science because I was looking > for python stuff. Now I'm finding more and more libraries and systems that I > discover for some totally other reason, and low and behold, it's got python > bindings, or python scripting capability. > > I do note that it seems to have a Matrix class in the standard library, and > it's nicer than the numpy Matrix class. > > And there is sciRuby: > > http://sciruby.com/ > > Doesn't look nearly as mature as scipy, but there is at least a community > building. > > And a lot of people really seem to like it. > > -Chris > > -- > > Christopher Barker, Ph.D. > Oceanographer > > Emergency Response Division > NOAA/NOS/OR&R (206) 526-6959 voice > 7600 Sand Point Way NE (206) 526-6329 fax > Seattle, WA 98115 (206) 526-6317 main reception > > chris.bar...@noaa.gov >
