> It’s puzzling why Python became the de facto standard scripting language rather than Ruby when the tooling was so inferior.
1. Ruby tooling wasn't superior when Python became the standard.
2. Until Rails, IIRC, Ruby had limited visibility outside of Japan, whereas Python already had deep penetration in lots of fields.
3. Ruby for quite a while, IIRC, had a pretty bad story on Windows compared to Python.
> Ruby tooling wasn't superior when Python became the standard.
For that matter, when Python became the standard, the modern conception of a "language ecosystem" scarcely existed.