I agree with him that Python is more useful right now as a general programming environment... mainly because it's been around longer, it's a more mature and stable platform, has better libraries in general, better performance, etc.

Python is only four years older than Ruby. The rest ... YMMV.

Yes, but Python gained a lot more mindshare in its early years than Ruby. Ruby is only now really gaining popularity, and therefore support.

Part of the reason that Ruby didn't gain that much traction early on was due to the the lack of English documentation.

That's pretty interesting. I'm pretty enamored with rails but just last week I wrote a ruby script for a client to pull some stats out of apache logs and it took forever to run so I'm sympathetic to a lot of his arguments.

His mild attempt at the end to give rails its due suggests it's less black and white than he paints it. There's good reason to have both languages in your toolbox.

You're quite right. I love Ruby but I hate it at the same time cuz it's so damn slow! Rails included! On the on the other hand I've heard great things about JRuby. And I got all hot and bothered when I recently found out that they've already integrated JRuby with Rails!http://docs.codehaus.org/display/JRUBY/2007/03/05/JRuby+0.9.8+Released I hope this gives Rails a much needed performance boost.

I guess it boils down to personal preference and what you want to do with the language. I chose Ruby cuz of Rails....and because Ruby's syntax generally fits my mind set.

Funny thing his blog is written in Ruby hehehe but seriously it's good to see that someone is hitting a wall. Never knew it was the runtimes fault that led to issues.

That's true of any set of Turing-complete languages.

Rails