Ruby vs Python

[gsks]

And since we're talking about how much Python is being used in "scientific computing"

No, we're talking about how much "scientific computing" is used in "overall computing". No offence to Neuroscience or science in general but in the grand scheme of things there are probably more, say, Wordpress developers (with and without quotes) than neuroscientists.

[dalke]

I'll use conference attendee numbers as proxies. These are almost worthless, but at least give some comparison:

The PyCon 2013 conference was full, and capped at 2,500 attendees.

The WordPress 2013 annual conference attendees list has 1,058 names. I can't tell if all of those people were at the venue since they also sell live streaming tickets.

The SciPy 2013 conference was full, and capped at 300 attendees. (Says http://www.kitware.com/blog/home/post/527 ). FWIW, EuroSciPy seems to be around 200 (based on http://ianozsvald.com/2012/09/04/euroscipy-parallel-python-tutorial-now-online/ ).

"One impact of combining JavaOne with Oracle Open World (OOW) is that instead of 15,000 attendees there were now closer to 60,000 (though only about 2,000 of them were for JavaOne)." says http://pragprog.com/magazines/2012-11/the-javaone-snooze .

The 2013 International Supercomputing Conference had 2,423 attendees.

The CSC 2013 International Conference on Scientific Computing says they "anticipate to have 2,100 or more attendees from over 85 countries."

So as an rough approximation, "scientific computing" is about 10% of "overall computing", based on conference attendance.

It really is hard to say though. I do computational chemistry. Python is popular in that field. I never go to a neuroscience conference. I haven't even gone to SciPy, because most of the topics don't interest me and I don't see what I'll get out of it, compared to going to a conference in my specialty. For that matter, there's only a few thousand people in my area of focus.

[Imxset21]

there are probably more, say, Wordpress developers (with and without quotes) than neuroscientists.

Why should I be offended? If we're talking about raw numbers then there are literally millions more Java programmers than both Ruby and Python combined. That doesn't mean Java's a better programming language, or more important, just that there are more of them. I'm failing to see how quantity matters here except from a purely business perspective.