

Rails is the best thing that ever happened to Python - acangiano
http://antoniocangiano.com/2008/03/04/rails-is-the-best-thing-that-ever-happened-to-python/

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henning
I think that picture of a stack of books is very telling.

2006: <http://www.garbett.org/files/books.jpg>

2008: <http://antoniocangiano.com/images/rubyandrailsbooks.jpg>

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anewaccountname
The 2008 one needs an update as of.. yesterday.

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fiaz
What a coincidence this article shows up. As of today, I've been researching
why I should drop Rails in favor of Django (or any other Pythonic framework)
for an upcoming project. Can anybody help shed some light on this for me?

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jamesbritt
You've ruled out all other Ruby options?

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fiaz
I'm open to anything. Rails is still the framework of choice; I need a good
reason to move to anything else.

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cstejerean
Why are you looking for a reason? Something must be making you uncomfortable
if you're actively looking for a reason to jump ship. Chances are you
shouldn't switch. Ruby is a good enough Python, and Python is a good enough
Ruby.

Unless there's something specific you dislike or have a strategic reason to
switch you should stick to what you know best (either Ruby=>Python or
Python=>Ruby).

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kashif
Is anyone surprised that Pylons doesn't get enough credit. I prefer it to
Django for most projects.

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hbien
How do you like it better than Django? I've been wanting to try it out for
some time now but haven't found the time.

Sometimes I think the included apps in Django too heavyweight. I get a lot of
"just because it's included doesn't mean you have to use it" and "don't re-
invent the wheel"/NIH responses from the mailing list.

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simonw
"Just because it's included doesn't mean you have to use it" sounds like a
pretty good argument to me. The Python standard library has hundreds of
modules that most people never touch, but no one complains that it's too
heavyweight. Django tries to take the same "batteries included" philosophy.

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misterbwong
I must admit that Ruby was the reason I started looking at Python as well as
other web frameworks. I've ultimately decided on Python/Django as my start
point.

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pchristensen
Does this mean RoR is a gateway drug?

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jrsims
Although I'm certain that Django lets you be agile, does it let you be more
agile than with Rails (in terms of both team and solo development)?

Answers to that may change the game somewhat (both can be made to work, but
which one lets you work better?)

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almost
They're both absolutely brilliant at the things they do best, which seem to be
slightly different. For other things they have varying degrees of difficulty
but still tend to be, in my experience, pretty good.

If you need a quick database driven website (less of a webapp) then Django is
perfect, I find the included admin is a real timesaver.

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systems
I used to hang around the Python community in the past, the chat rooms read
the mailing list, always check the website for updates.

And here is what I think went wrong:

1\. White Space, syntax does matter and so many people where turned off just
by the syntax choice of white space, its just annoying

2\. Zope, this framework always had a popularity of being too complex, Zope 3
was a rewrite to fix the problem with Zope 2, Guido worked for Zope for a
while, I thnk he left, if start looking at Zope and see it was rewritten from
scratch, you become warry, Zope till today have the reputation by being too
complex and forcing you to learn new zope specific languages

3\. Twisted Matrix, it also had a reputation of being too complex and it didnt
serve a common need anyway, what the heck is event driven networking anyway!
And their community, sooooooo exclusive

4\. The community, a lot more interesting ppl use Perl and Ruby, do you know
of any cool blog by a pythoneer? do you know any cool pythoneer? even Matz is
cooler than Guido, and Matz isnt even cool! Open source project need people
considered to be cool in their community, Dan Short was the only cool Python I
remember, he disapeared I dont know what happened to him

Zed Shaw also occasionaly drop a good word for Python but trust me, if he digs
deeper into Python, he will backlash.

