> Seems like most of the Ruby gains are related to memory usage.
That would be a welcome addition, especially with Rails where you typically end up running your web app, background worker and action cable as separate processes. That's (3) running services each booting up your application to some degree.
Combine that with most apps using very little CPU and more and more memory, it's nice to be able to reduce memory when you can to optimize the machines you host things on. It always feels dirty having a server using 60% memory and 5% CPU.
I don’t have a ton of love for Python now that I’ve moved on to static typing but it’s hard for me to see myself choosing Ruby over Python for anything.
Python has gotten significantly faster, has static typing built in with an ecosystem of static typecheckers, and async is an ergonomic first class language feature - sure async can have rough edges but the 99.9% case is dead simple with no surprises.
Obviously packaging for Python is still a pain but I don’t see Ruby being better
Python improvements are on par with ruby, and ruby has a JIT, which means that upside fir real world improvement is much higher.
Python has no static typing. It has type annotations, which a few 3rd party static analysers such as mypy use. Ruby has had the same since 3.0 with rbs. The ecosystem may be less mature, but it exists, and Python's isn't necessarily perfect.
Python async is terrible. You have to colorize functions, opt out from a significant part of the ecosystem which either does not support async, or is very unstable, and completely relearn how to do debugging / performance measurement. Ruby has smth better since ruby 3.0, via the fiber scheduler, which supports running network related code asynchronously with *no changes or special function annotations*.
Ruby packaging has been figured out since 2007, and has been influencial for other ecosystems, being the first mainstream language adopting lockfiles.
If you prefer using Python, you are entitled to your opinion and choice. But those arguments are all FUD.
But then speed in a dynamic language is often very context dependent. If I want to do Rails I won't choose Python. If I want to do machine learning, Python is the obvious choice.
> Obviously packaging for Python is still a pain but I don’t see Ruby being better
Ruby packaging just works whereas Python's is a pain. Can't see how you don't see it being better.
The recent Python benchmarks all seem to use the same benchmark suite (which is incredibly complex to the point that it's unclear what is actually being measured) or hype the Microsoft involvement.
Even if you believe them, it is just 10-60% speedup for a very slow language. It won't show up in web applications.
I've only ever known Javascript/ Typescript. I've been thinking of picking up ruby to learn "practical" functional programming and maybe see what the infatuation with rails is, but I'm starting to think it might be more "valuable" to learn python.
I wouldn’t recommend python or ruby if you’re trying to learn more about functional programming… you may as well stick with JS in that case (imo, at least). I’d choose a language that has at least had native immutability. Something like Elixir/Erlang, OCaml, Clojure, or F#.
Purely my opinion after learning and professionally doing both Ruby and Python. If elegance and consistency in APIs matter, Ruby is by far the preference. Generally speaking (again from my own experience which should be taken with a grain of salt) the Ruby community tends to value readability/maintainability of code a lot higher, so working in the codebases is typically a lot more pleasant.
Python and Ruby are both only really as functional as you choose to use them. You’ll see more imperative code in the wild for both, though the big data stuff in Python leans more functional.
Rails and Django are both still super popular from scanning job listings, so e-commerce employment wise they’re both great.
Python would be the most popular option, but, for an OO language, Ruby feels clean and intuitive to me in a way that other languages, especially Python, don't. It has a performance cost, though. The two languages' performance may be roughly equivalent, but Python has more native-code libraries for performance-critical tasks. You don't see many ML projects in Ruby. :) There's crystal-lang, but that has a much smaller community behind it.
Julia, though, if you're looking for a language that isn't OO in addition to functional.
If you already know TypeScript, just use a functional approach to your programs, and/or use libraries like fp-ts and io-ts. Ruby is definitely not more FP based than TS.
Every time I try to get a project going with truffleruby, I get all kinds of dependency problems. I haven't had the patience to resolve all of the library problems yet, so I give up.
Pure speculation—Ruby has a deeper OOP story (everything is an object), and that comes with a builtin performance impact. I also feel like performance was never a top priority with the language (ergonomics instead), so certain aspects of the core design may not lend themselves to optimization as easily.
Seems like most of the Ruby gains are related to memory usage.