Ruby and Python are both scripting languages and have been since being invented. Static type annotations are a dumb thing to add to a language like Python and Ruby, they’re not static languages. If you want static typing you should be using a different language. The syntax is most definitely not worse, and that’s not an opinion, Python’s for comprehensions are nightmares of readability, and hardly make sense 5 minutes after you write them. Ruby prioritizes readability over everything else.

Speed is almost exactly the same, with Ruby winning on many benchmarks. The only people saying Python wins are Python programmers. There was a post on the clojure community the other day comparing specific instances and while clojure was winning them all, Ruby was in second on most of them.

Python only looks better from the outside. I spent years coding in both at the exact same time at the same company. The only two things Python wins on is number of packages, and even that is a dumb metric (looking at you npm), and Click, which is an absolutely fantastic CLI framework.