There was a time (more than a decade ago) when I wondered if I should learn Perl or Python. Unfortunately I picked Perl, subsequently forgot it and learned Python instead.
Ruby is a nicer language for general scripting, ie “better bash,” as that’s what it was originally designed for. It’s also a bit faster, and has a vastly better / simpler package management system.
Python does have great scientific / math libraries, and is worth knowing.
One nice thing is the two languages are so similar that it’s pretty easy to switch between them and use whichever fits the bill.
I was a Ruby programmer for a long time, but I think the world has moved on. Nowadays, I want a language with some type checking, and Ruby is extremely hostile to any kind of static analysis. Rails was pretty exciting as a replacement for how we built websites in the perl/php era, but now that React has taken over, Rails feels weirdly bloated. I would probably choose Typescript for basically everything now.
