Back in 2013, PyCon was local to me so I dropped $300 to attend and drove down to Santa Clara each day to Learn Me Some Python -- and spend each whole day around Python people, so it was a bit of hallway track interaction but mostly talks.
The overwhelming feeling I got about the Python community was that they are nice people and very welcoming, especially to Python n00bs like me. The talks got me quite excited about Python 3.x and I came away thinking it might be a good system scripting language to complement our Clojure-based applications... But after all the 3.x hype at the conference and promises that it would replace 2.7 everywhere "very soon", I quickly ran into the reality that 2.7 was baked into all the O/S that I needed to interact with and trying to build anything with 3.x was going to be a giant pain at that point. So, we continued to use a mix of bash and Clojure for system scripting (and over time moved more and more to Clojure). A decade later, 3.x is finally becoming the default everywhere but I no longer feel a need to use something other than Clojure for what I originally thought I might use Python for.
I learned Ruby via Washington University's "Programming Languages" course which I took online, and I enjoyed the course enough to volunteer as a Community TA for several more runs. It taught Standard ML (statically typed, functional), Racket (dynamically typed, functional), and Ruby (dynamically typed, OOP) to show the three non-mainstream options and how each quadrant affected how you solve problems. I liked SML a lot (I had used it briefly at university, during my PhD work), I quite liked Racket, but I really disliked Ruby. I didn't like its syntax, and I didn't like that you couldn't easily tell what a piece of code did because all the classes are open and can be dynamically modified at runtime by any other piece of code: there was no locality of effect.
I've heard that the Ruby community folks are very nice tho' and it's a fairly human-centric tech world.
Back in 2013, PyCon was local to me so I dropped $300 to attend and drove down to Santa Clara each day to Learn Me Some Python -- and spend each whole day around Python people, so it was a bit of hallway track interaction but mostly talks.
The overwhelming feeling I got about the Python community was that they are nice people and very welcoming, especially to Python n00bs like me. The talks got me quite excited about Python 3.x and I came away thinking it might be a good system scripting language to complement our Clojure-based applications... But after all the 3.x hype at the conference and promises that it would replace 2.7 everywhere "very soon", I quickly ran into the reality that 2.7 was baked into all the O/S that I needed to interact with and trying to build anything with 3.x was going to be a giant pain at that point. So, we continued to use a mix of bash and Clojure for system scripting (and over time moved more and more to Clojure). A decade later, 3.x is finally becoming the default everywhere but I no longer feel a need to use something other than Clojure for what I originally thought I might use Python for.
I learned Ruby via Washington University's "Programming Languages" course which I took online, and I enjoyed the course enough to volunteer as a Community TA for several more runs. It taught Standard ML (statically typed, functional), Racket (dynamically typed, functional), and Ruby (dynamically typed, OOP) to show the three non-mainstream options and how each quadrant affected how you solve problems. I liked SML a lot (I had used it briefly at university, during my PhD work), I quite liked Racket, but I really disliked Ruby. I didn't like its syntax, and I didn't like that you couldn't easily tell what a piece of code did because all the classes are open and can be dynamically modified at runtime by any other piece of code: there was no locality of effect.
I've heard that the Ruby community folks are very nice tho' and it's a fairly human-centric tech world.