These days I see a lot of startup using Python. Earlier it used to be PHP, then came era of Ruby (mainly because of Ruby on Rails) and now it is Python.<p>Any special reason or everybody is just going with the flow or am I missing something?
When RoR was all the rage (the one-true-rage even!) couple of years back, there were a lot of people in the Python world, who were concerned that Ruby might steal the thunder from Python.<p>Python people attacked this "problem" in multiple ways. One was the emergence of competing frameworks like Django and Pylons. The other was to work hard on other product lifecycle stories. Some of which were influenced by what was gaining traction elsewhere (automated deployments, TDD). But, some new things also took flight in the Python world, like WSGI, which inspired similar endeavours (Rack, Plack/Perl).<p>Also, Python has better overall ecosystem. You want libraries for obscure (say HVAC) protocol, you have a better chance of finding it in Python, than in Ruby.<p>I think more developers relate to "don't be too clever" attitude taken by python than admitted among this crowd.<p>While RoR was busy redefining the entire Ruby ecosystem in it's own image, Python people were busy building stuff that were truly framework agnostic. Eg: Paste, WSGI, SQLAlchemy, Various templating languages like Jinja2, Mako.<p>Today, it is very easy choose from <i>many</i> competing python frameworks without drinking any one brand of kool-aid.
Basically, you're seeing just as much Python as ever. However, because Rubyists aren't making such a spectacle of themselves, you don't hear as much about Ruby/Rails as you used to. And what you do hear doesn't get as much traction as it used to because after several years of ruby news the community has grown more tired of it.
I think that "bad technology" can kill a startup, but slightly different variations of good technology don't have much effect. Choose what you know/like best. And Ruby and Python are both in this latter category.<p>I think it's just that Ruby enjoyed a brief surge of hype which pushed it to the forefront of the startup founders' mind; this has now ebbed a bit and Python use rises up to its natural level.<p>I wonder if Ruby will come back a bit, though. There hasn't been much hype, but in the last few months the Ruby community has really gone for broke, with rails 3, ruby 1.9.2, rvm reaching maturity and bundler to handle dependencies. Things are changing so fast I think the magnitude of the changes haven't sunk in for most people but it's a whole new environment and really impressive IMO.
Since you are comparing it to PHP and Ruby, it appears that your comment refers to their use in web development. I can't say much about the broader use of the languages, but here is some perspective regarding the web development side.<p>A little over a year ago I compared the jobs available for PHP, Django and Rails (<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=805931" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=805931</a>). I did the same again 3 months ago (<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1459119" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1459119</a>). A quick glance now shows the same trend and ratios (eg, simply hired has 20,125 PHP jobs, a 25% increase in 3 months; 5,334 Rails jobs, a 39% increase in 3 months; and 1,153 Django jobs, a 25% increase in 3 months).<p>TL;DR: PHP, Django and Rails jobs are all on the rise, there are vastly more PHP jobs than either Rails or Django jobs and there are many more Rails jobs than Django jobs, and this applies to startups, too.
A large part of it is that Django is maturing and gaining traction as a great alternative to frameworks like Rails. Many of the complaints of Rails, such as extensive magic and monkeypatching, are less of a problem with Django, so to many it's a fresh breath of air.
Pesonally, I like Python because it is simple, oo, lot simpler to debug and goes well with javascript/json(utf-8 by default).<p>I am big fan of Tornado - tornadoweb.org<p>Almost free hosting by google appengine is not bad either!
4 reasons, why Python more popular than Ruby:<p>1. Google App Engine<p>2. Good webdev ecosystem (Django,etc.)<p>3. Science/Engineering and Machine Learning libraries - replacement to Matlab<p>4. Good support for system scripting
There is something about Python that everybody likes, whether it's the syntax, functional programming features, NumPy or one of the other numerous libraries. This quiet support allows Python to remain potent while fads die down.
I think what you must be referring to is the adoption of Python for web-based startups. Python has always been popular in certain industries/niches.<p>From our perspective we use what we feel is best and we use more than one language on some of our projects. For example, we have a LOAD of legacy code in PHP and we use it still quite extensively for some of our sites. We use Python on some of the same sites for parsing and anything requiring heavy lifting.<p>Ultimately - use what you feel is best for the job at hand
Could this be seen as a correction in the market? Is the market reacting to technologies (i.e. Django and ROR) that are speeding up development times as well as improving productivity?
Many reasons from my PoV.<p>Recently, I could kick off writing Cocoa apps in PyObjC with very little bit of learning to do. Within a day I feel confident on how to build my app.<p>I know a few profs who find it easy to train their students in Python and get them productive within a week. Even if its an electronics course. <a href="http://pykata.appspot.com/statements/" rel="nofollow">http://pykata.appspot.com/statements/</a><p>Besides prototyping/experimenting in Python is much easier. It was zillions of options for whatever you wish to do - webapps, scientific computing, visualization, network apps, interfacing hardware, and what not.
<a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/python" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/python</a>
<a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ruby" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ruby</a><p>look at the "question tagged" and "Related Tags".
maybe ruby is still focus "too much" on rails, on the other side, python has better overall ecosystem.
The available jobs data suggests that Ruby is growing faster (note that the absolute numbers are still in favor of python)<p><a href="http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=python,ruby,java&l=&relative=1" rel="nofollow">http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=python,ruby,java&l=...</a>