Ruby is my favorite language, and often it is a joy to use because of its combined attributes of brevity, expressive power, and feature consistency.

It's disappointing that there are so many more jobs for another popular language - one that lacks the elegance and consistency but which has a larger ecosystem.

As far as I know, the only well known reason for a company to choose Ruby is if they want Rails (and obviously if the founding team already knows/likes Ruby). But that other language also has a popular (and comparatively clumsy) web framework plus well known modules for all the fantasy capabilities that startups dream of... you know, the AI/ML "not sure how we will use it but we know it will be great, and it's good for marketing".

Sadly, I don't expect this situation to reverse in the future. Maybe like blockchain, once the AI/ML fantasy hype dies down the other comparatively-unpleasant language will lose general appeal and Ruby will gain more attention.

Edit - also, the domain squatters "rubylang.org" should lose their domain. There is no legitimate excuse for having this domain which redirects to a general garbage site.

You are obviously referring to Python and so I would like to note a few things. (I have nothing against Ruby)

> Ruby ... its combined attributes of brevity, expressive power, and feature consistency.

> [Python] lacks the elegance and consistency

First I would argue Python is very consistent in its design, it aims to only have one obvious way to do things and so it's easy to guess how apis will work. It also aims for explicitness, which makes code very easy to follow and reason about.

Secondly on "brevity" and "expressiveness", I don't really see them as an attribute that make a language "better". Sure for experienced developers who like a personal game of code golf (don't we all at times!) those are attributes can can make coding more "fun". But that doesn't necessarily translate to code that is ideal when working as part of a team, or code that is easy to follow when a new developer starts on an existing codebase.

Ultimately I think that's why Python has gained more traction than Ruby, it's an "easer" language to follow and start with. Ruby is probably a more fun and intellectually stimulating language to work with though.

Python gained traction because of Google (Google used it initially then Guido worked for them for a decade+, vs. Matz at Heroku/salesforce) and then because it's the easiest way to use ML libs. That's it.

It's slower than Ruby, has worse package management and less consistent syntax but if you want to use Tensorflow, PyTorch, etc..., it's the default.

> It's slower than Ruby.

Any reference/numbers to back this up ? Just genuinely curious about this.

https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks

Bearing in mind these are probably not even using YJIT, which makes Ruby considerably faster in some scenarios.