You describe what happened, which I saw happen too. The question I have is
why though. Right,
why did python's use in scientific computing keep expanding, and not ruby's?
Why was python already taing over many use cases by the 2000s, but not ruby?
Why did python develop the following at multiple levels in academia, and not ruby? (Why is Perl attrition relevant, when ruby was in fact explicitly based on Perl?)
That's the question, not the answer!
It seems like a lot of the answer is NumPy, which makes the question -- why did NumPy happen on python, not ruby?
Certainly one answer could be "nothing having to do with the features of the language, it's just a coincidence, they chose to write it in Python, if those working on numpy had chosen to use ruby instead, history would be different."
But one hypothesis is that maybe NumPy wouldn't have been as easy in ruby as python.
Someone else suggested the first numpy release happened before the first ruby release, so that could also be an answer.
That's the question, not the answer!
It seems like a lot of the answer is NumPy, which makes the question -- why did NumPy happen on python, not ruby?
Certainly one answer could be "nothing having to do with the features of the language, it's just a coincidence, they chose to write it in Python, if those working on numpy had chosen to use ruby instead, history would be different."
But one hypothesis is that maybe NumPy wouldn't have been as easy in ruby as python.
Someone else suggested the first numpy release happened before the first ruby release, so that could also be an answer.