>So I wonder, was it easier to write C/C++ or fortran compiled extensions in python than it was in ruby?
Don't know about technical aspects of "easier" but it may have simply been an accident of history.
E.g. in 1995 (before Ruby 1.0 December 1996[0]), David Beazley was already wrapping C Language code to Python. Deep link to presentation:
https://youtu.be/riuyDEHxeEo?t=52m27s
So DB's Python code for scientific code was released in Feb 1996 and presented in July 1996. Python being released in 1991 was already talked about in magazines in 1995. David's presentation also references Jim Hugunin[1] and he authored the 1995 Numeric package which was the ancestor to NumPy. Once an ecosystem gets started, it can attract more mindshare and snowball into an insurmountable lead that neither Ruby nor Julia will ever catch up to.
In other words... If the opposite timeline happened and Ruby was released earlier in 1991 and Python later in 1996, things may have played out differently.
So folks like David Beazley and Jim Hugunin chose Python as the scripting host language for their C Language code probably because Ruby wasn't mature and well-known back in 1995. Apparently, Ruby didn't widely spread outside of Japan until 1998 when the first documentation in English appeared.[2]
Don't know about technical aspects of "easier" but it may have simply been an accident of history.
E.g. in 1995 (before Ruby 1.0 December 1996[0]), David Beazley was already wrapping C Language code to Python. Deep link to presentation: https://youtu.be/riuyDEHxeEo?t=52m27s
So DB's Python code for scientific code was released in Feb 1996 and presented in July 1996. Python being released in 1991 was already talked about in magazines in 1995. David's presentation also references Jim Hugunin[1] and he authored the 1995 Numeric package which was the ancestor to NumPy. Once an ecosystem gets started, it can attract more mindshare and snowball into an insurmountable lead that neither Ruby nor Julia will ever catch up to.
In other words... If the opposite timeline happened and Ruby was released earlier in 1991 and Python later in 1996, things may have played out differently.
So folks like David Beazley and Jim Hugunin chose Python as the scripting host language for their C Language code probably because Ruby wasn't mature and well-known back in 1995. Apparently, Ruby didn't widely spread outside of Japan until 1998 when the first documentation in English appeared.[2]
[1] https://youtu.be/riuyDEHxeEo?t=30m04s
[2] http://blog.nicksieger.com/articles/2006/10/20/rubyconf-hist...