I have a very limited experience with Python (3 months of production experience), but vast Ruby experience and I think a lot of the things apply to both. For me these are reasons why I would choose Rust over Python or Ruby in most cases:
* it's relatively easy to write code that will pretty much never crash. yes, Rust will not prevent all of the bugs, but it will prevent almost all of the things that end up as a runtime exception in dynamic languages. So ou will not end up with an error tracker full of errors
* refactoring is so much easier in Rust - I can enter a new project, change a bunch of stuff and after I fix compile errors and tests my confidence that I didn't break anything is like 10 times higher than in Ruby or Python
* while most of the time speed is not a major concern for backend development, it sometimes is a huge bonus. There were cases in the past when I had to spend a lot of time to optimise Ruby code, because it was just too slow (imagine rendering a lot of HTML, doing computation that is hard to do on the DB side etc)
* handling JSON with serde is just on another level
* Rust is very versatile. When a company starts using a language, they will naturally try to fit as much stuff into the language as possible, after all if you have mostly Python devs, you will prefer Python. A lot of people say "just use the right tool for the job", but even if there was something like "the right tool for the job", in practice it's more like: if the downsides of using our primary tech are huge, let's consider introducing a new language, otherwise let's stick with what we have. I've seen it numerous times in the past. I feel like with Rust the downsides of using it for most of the stuff are much smaller than for example for most of the other languages
* it's relatively easy to write code that will pretty much never crash. yes, Rust will not prevent all of the bugs, but it will prevent almost all of the things that end up as a runtime exception in dynamic languages. So ou will not end up with an error tracker full of errors
* refactoring is so much easier in Rust - I can enter a new project, change a bunch of stuff and after I fix compile errors and tests my confidence that I didn't break anything is like 10 times higher than in Ruby or Python
* while most of the time speed is not a major concern for backend development, it sometimes is a huge bonus. There were cases in the past when I had to spend a lot of time to optimise Ruby code, because it was just too slow (imagine rendering a lot of HTML, doing computation that is hard to do on the DB side etc)
* handling JSON with serde is just on another level
* Rust is very versatile. When a company starts using a language, they will naturally try to fit as much stuff into the language as possible, after all if you have mostly Python devs, you will prefer Python. A lot of people say "just use the right tool for the job", but even if there was something like "the right tool for the job", in practice it's more like: if the downsides of using our primary tech are huge, let's consider introducing a new language, otherwise let's stick with what we have. I've seen it numerous times in the past. I feel like with Rust the downsides of using it for most of the stuff are much smaller than for example for most of the other languages