Being a professor who teaches the stuff for a living and grades other people's work, you remind me of that typical PhD student that knows enough to talk about his work but nothing enough in detail to ever graduate. No offense.
Let me add that in life is the new things that give you an edge, not those things that everybody knows.
ok, but still his analogy is not bad. Ivan's arguments against web2py so far are unconvincing. It reminds myself, right out of college, when I thought "I knew" things, and I was fully opinionated for everything, as long as I had heard something about it.
The Dunnin-Kruger effect in action. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect
I judge software still in development by the people developing it, especially if it's something that'll be part of my project for a long time. It tells me about the direction it's going, and it's a fast and incredibly accurate method. If you heard that Linus Torvalds designed a DVCS, and Microsoft designed a DVCS, which do you think would actually work? Hopefully, that decision wouldn't take more than 10 seconds. There are exceptions; you might have subtly different (but important) requirements than what the library/tool author was designing for.
When you see this amount of unjustified duplication and defensive rationalization (including off-site remarks from the developer that building an ORM is easy), warning sirens should go off in your head.
I did go through some of the source code, but it's not my job to provide detailed code review. I can say that the packaging is strange, it doesn't resemble Python, and I've seen better versions of everything bundled in web2py. I'm not sure the integration and "ease" of install is worth being stuck to this framework.
I disagree with your criterial of looking at previous qualifications of the developer but by your own criteria you should love web2py.
Yes, developing the ORM was very very easy compared to, for example, developing www.fermiqcd.net (BTW we should be friends since I see you are in data representation and me too these days mdp.cti.depaul.edu/vqcd).
I will agree with you that for some of the web2py components there is a better module out there, the point you are missing is that the web2py modules are designed to work together while the alternatives are not. You will not appreciate this until you try it. Here is an example: Pygments is a much better general purpose syntax highlighter than the web2py's one, nevertheless web2py's one can highlight web2py code, create clickable links from web2py keywords to the web2py online documentation, is faster and fits in 10k. If you need to syntax highlight Java or PHP code you can still easy_install and use Pygments. Although you can, the web2py modules are not designed to be taken out and used separately.
In mentioning that its "the new things that give you an edge," are you suggesting that web2py is one of those new things? In what non-trivial way do you feel that it differentiates itself from the literally hundreds of other web frameworks?
Examining the documentation I found the unsatisfying answer: "web2py is better because it is faster, it is easier to use, and it is stable and always backward compatible."
Do you seriously want a laundry list of everything wrong with web2py? Would that help you in some way, or would you refute it with a personal attack? If you do, I could send you an email this week.
Let me add that in life is the new things that give you an edge, not those things that everybody knows.