I had these general impressions as a guy who started out with PHP who didn't know much at the time:
Python really presented itself as a general purpose language for me. For example, as a language that could do a lot of the general scripting that you could do with Bash could but using a language that is much, much easier to read. Even though I can write it better now and appreciate how much faster it runs, at the time I had a really hard time writing and understanding Bash scripts.
Ruby on the other hand, almost seemed as a language you had to learn as a pre-requisite to get to use Ruby on Rails. But if you did not care about Rails, then there was little incentive to learn it. Since I already used PHP for the web and had lots of experience with its respective frameworks (like Symfony) I did not feel the need to double up on a web language / framework combo.
And, yes I know it is used in other frameworks/software but the perception that I had at the time was that Rails was the most popular use case for it.
But then when Python really solidified itself for me as the truly general purpose language was seeing it as the language behind projects like Pandas, Numpy and Ansible for example and being able to use that software no problem.
And all this in spite of the fact how readable both of them were and the fact they both have great package managers.
So all those things being equal I chose to learn Python because it seemed like I get more out of it beyond web development.
I will say this about Rails though, Ruby on Rails is one of the most influential web frameworks of all time and Laravel borrowed so much from it.
Python really presented itself as a general purpose language for me. For example, as a language that could do a lot of the general scripting that you could do with Bash could but using a language that is much, much easier to read. Even though I can write it better now and appreciate how much faster it runs, at the time I had a really hard time writing and understanding Bash scripts.
Ruby on the other hand, almost seemed as a language you had to learn as a pre-requisite to get to use Ruby on Rails. But if you did not care about Rails, then there was little incentive to learn it. Since I already used PHP for the web and had lots of experience with its respective frameworks (like Symfony) I did not feel the need to double up on a web language / framework combo.
And, yes I know it is used in other frameworks/software but the perception that I had at the time was that Rails was the most popular use case for it.
But then when Python really solidified itself for me as the truly general purpose language was seeing it as the language behind projects like Pandas, Numpy and Ansible for example and being able to use that software no problem.
And all this in spite of the fact how readable both of them were and the fact they both have great package managers.
So all those things being equal I chose to learn Python because it seemed like I get more out of it beyond web development.
I will say this about Rails though, Ruby on Rails is one of the most influential web frameworks of all time and Laravel borrowed so much from it.