My guess is that popularity impact has to be in terms of number of jobs (commercial/freelance) out there. <br><br>Books are fair indication of hype, but not necessarily the actual use of a language/technology.<br><br>However what I feel is more important is the impact based on the strategies rolled out by global leaders in technology.
<br><br>Whatever said there is a huge momentum favouring Ruby, which is real and number of vendors are heavily betting on Ruby as a language and Rails as a platform. Though the number of developers knowing/writing Python eclipses number of Ruby/Rails developers many vendors feel that there will be more enterprise developers writing code in Ruby very soon.
<br><br>For example Code Gear( a Borland Company) has shipped a commercial IDE for Ruby/Rails. I did meet their CEO in person when he was in Bangalore. He said that they are looking at Python, but does not see Python as an opportunity among serious developers who will cough up money for a professional IDE.
<br><br>Similarly Sun Microsystems is planning to bet heavily on Ruby, with JRuby and is infact expected to officially recommend JRuby powered Rails as an alternate for Java to millions of developers when it comes to non enterprise web development.
<br><br>Sun is also expecting to roll out a strategy for Python (Jython) but that might only roll out in end of 2008. However, official tag line is that their strategy around Python( Jython) will not revolve around the web, but will position Python for an alternate market. Folks whom I know at Sun, tells me that they have done a research among their enterprise customers, and more of these companies are siding Ruby, and in fact they fear that before their developer base abandon Java for Ruby, they'd like to get Ruby on the Java wagon.
<br><br>While it is good to celebrate such trivial trends in this thread, the stark reality is that Ruby is stealing the thunder from Python, and it is a fact.<br><br><br>Please do not interpret it in any other sense, I am still a strong Python loyalist and recommend the language any day over any other language, and probabaly will remain the same for many more years to come.
<br><br><br>Ramdas<br><br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Jan 4, 2008 5:34 PM, Sridhar Ratnakumar <<a href="mailto:sridhar.ratna@gmail.com">sridhar.ratna@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
'Comments ratio' looks interesting,<br><a href="http://www.ohloh.net/languages?sort=comment_ratio" target="_blank">http://www.ohloh.net/languages?sort=comment_ratio</a> (ohloh covers most<br>active open source projects)
<br><br>The lack of abstractions in Java code is reflected by its huge 35%<br>comment ratio! Python is way below in rank for obvious reasons. :-)<br><font color="#888888"><br><br>--<br><a href="http://nearfar.org/" target="_blank">
http://nearfar.org/</a><br></font><div><div></div><div class="Wj3C7c">_______________________________________________<br>BangPypers mailing list<br><a href="mailto:BangPypers@python.org">BangPypers@python.org</a><br><a href="http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/bangpypers" target="_blank">
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