The 1.8 to 1.9 transition was a significant hurdle, and virtually all of the anecdotes I&#x27;ve heard from people who quit Ruby because of its purportedly bad backwards compatibility were about 1.8-&gt;1.9. The cause of the difficulty was similar: Unicode.<p>In any case, Ruby has&#x2F;had a much different dynamic back then. Most developers using Ruby were doing so because of Rails. When Rails made the move, <i>not</i> switching would have been tech-debt-suicide for any stack depending on Rails or library that was heavily associated with Rails.<p>I&#x27;ve just recently started using Python...and while there are a few big players who still have SDKs in 2.x...I can&#x27;t think of any single Python library I&#x27;ve used that has had as much pull as RoR does on Ruby.