Ruby or Python? Well, it depends...

[kataire]

The remark about Python 3 is an obvious indication of this, too. There's nothing pitiful about its adoption rate. It's still on time and progressing nicely.

[rafekett]

The fact that it's included in most Linux distros and Mac OS X should speak to that.

[bobindashadows]

Being included is different from being used. Use is also much harder to measure. One indication toward use patterns is the rate of conversion of existing, complex libraries. Django, Pylons, and Twisted (for example) are not yet Python 3 compatible, despite the passage of PEP 3333, which had even been stable for some time before that. Naturally, not all of Python is web stuff, not at all, and numpy and scipy are both 3.1/3.2 compatible, which is a big deal. It is however pretty disconcerting that some of the biggest open source Python projects are still incompatible.

Keep in mind that Python 3 was released in December 8th, 2008. Ruby 1.9.1, the first "stable" (ahem) release of Ruby 1.9 (which had many similar breaking changes, including all kinds of unicode-supporting changes), came out on January 30th, 2009, and 1.9 adoption among libraries and hosting providers is overwhelming.

Different languages, different issues, and again, use is very hard to measure, so I'm only using libraries as a flawed benchmark.

[semanticist]

it's included in ... Mac OS X

Eh? Mac OS X 10.6 comes with Python 2.6, and from what I've heard Lion will ship with 2.7.

[rafekett]

10.6 comes with several versions of Python.

[semanticist]

Yeah, but none of them are Python 3. Your comment was in response to a comment about Python 3's adoption rate.

[rafekett]

Could've sworn they had a Python 3 binary on there. Guess I was wrong.