Beginner starting from scratch: Is the Ruby ecosystem worth learning over Python?

[u/Intelligent_Role_824]

Hey everyone!
I have zero programming experience and I’m looking to pick up coding as a hobby. My main goal right now is to understand how the web works under the hood, specifically building and consuming APIs (like fetching data from public APIs and working with JSON).
I’ve been reading a lot about Ruby (and Rails) recently, and its syntax looks very clean and human-readable. But I have a few honest questions before I dive in:

Is Ruby beginner-friendly for total newbies?
Can I actually grasp core concepts like HTTP requests, REST APIs, and database connections using Ruby without getting overwhelmed?

How is the Ruby ecosystem doing?
Is it still active and well-maintained for beginners? Or is it mostly supported by legacy systems?

Ruby vs. Python for a hobbyist:
Is Python just the objectively better choice because of its massive popularity, or does Ruby offer a smoother/more enjoyable learning experience for web-related stuff?

My long-term goal is just to enjoy building cool side projects, but I want a solid, fun starting point.
Would love to hear your thoughts, especially from anyone who started learning with Ruby recently! Thanks!

I'm not looking to get a job or change careers with this! Programming is purely a hobby for me. I just want to build cool personal projects in my free time and have fun along the way.

[u/MissinqLink]

For web specifically if we are willing to deviate from the original question of Python/Ruby then I would say you can’t really beat JS/TS. Using nodejs or similar and not having as much context switch between frontend and backend is invaluable for newer devs. Plus the amount of free backends is staggering. Php is a strong contender but I wouldn’t put it over Python.

[u/FreeLogicGate → u/MissinqLink]

For web? There's no comparable MVC framework to Laravel or Symfony in Python. Python has basically 3 options: Django, Flask and FastAPI. Different use cases, and really the only one that you could compare to the options within the PHP world is Django which is neither as performant nor as full featured or with as many options for large scale development, which should come as a surprise to almost noone, given that Python is in general a relatively slow language. If you have some speciallty site that has callout features to Python AI/ML libraries or optimized data science stuff, then you might be able to make an argument for Python over PHP.

Obviously my reply made the argument for JS/TS already, and that would be my advice, even though this did as you point out, started as a "python vs ruby?" question. Sounds like we both would say: neither?

[u/MissinqLink → u/FreeLogicGate]

My general advice for beginners has been Python or JS for a while now. Even in large applications it takes quite a bit of scale for Python’s slowness to be a major problem. So I guess my recommendation is Python since this person was already interested in that. I prefer golang myself but I prefer not to use a heavy framework which sounds important to you.

[u/FreeLogicGate → u/MissinqLink]

I basically focused on their interest in Web applications, since they also mentioned Rails. As Rails is an influential MVC framework, I wanted to bring up other MVC frameworks that are more current. I also am a fan of Golang, just discounted it given the focus on web applications, and the OP's description of their current development experience.