[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Alex Martelli) writes: > Robert Kern <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > ... >> Picking RoR because you want to do the project in Ruby makes sense. >> Picking Ruby because it only has one web framework is as silly as picking >> one Python web framework at random. Just because RoR is the only Ruby web >> framework around doesn't mean it's suitable for every project. > If you claim there's a web project that's unfeasible to do in Ruby, > you'd better come up with a strong example. If you're making no such > claim, which would be counter to the claims of the Ruby community, then > there aren't gonna be any web projects unfeasible with Rails, either.
There's a difference between "feasible" and "suitable". The claim that everything is feasible with RoR is trivially true because Ruby - and hence RoR - is presumably turing complete. But this claim is uninteresting. The *interesting* claim is "RoR is suitable for all web projects." That's not trivially true. My experience with other web platforms - both built around Python and not - is that this claim has very much in common with the claim "X is suitable for all programming projects", for some programming language X. I don't believe such a programming language exists (though proving that is well-nigh impossible), and I'm pretty confident that such a web platform doesn't exist, though the problem space hasn't existed for long enough to be sure. Of course, I don't know RoR. If you've got a pointer to a discussion of the kinds of things RoR is good for, I'd appreciate it. Googling turns up tutorials, and that's all. > The multiplicity of frameworks in Python obviously makes the situation > very different: there might well be projects for which Python's quite > suitable IF a fairy godmother pointed you to just the right framework... > but lacking a fairy godmother, you're out of luck. I did a fairly thorough investigation of web frameworks that let us write Python (we didn't care what the framework was written in; merely that it interfaced with Python) for one of the systems I've built this year. I wouldn't call the evaluation of web frameworks a problem - we met our schedules, and the tool evaluation phase was by *far* the shortest phase in the project, taking less than a week. Most of the evaluations were easy - read the description of the framework, and decide that we're working outside the problem space it's desinged for. It certainly wasn't wasted time - I found a tool that I hadn't heard of previously that was nearly perfectly suited to the job at hand. > To put it another way: one reason I love Python is that I strongly > subscribe to the idea that there should preferably be only one obvious > way to do something. Unfortunately, this principle is very badly broken > by the multiplicity of Python web frameworks. The problem is that "building a web site" is a single "something" in the same way that "writing a computer program" is a single "something". Each represents a wide range of different problems, and the obvious way to do one of those something may not be the obvious way to do another of them. <mike -- Mike Meyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list