It's been a week now since my "Just lost another one to Rails" post, in which I said that a buddy of mine down in the States was switching to Ruby, after using Python for two years, because he and his colleagues needed a lightweight, ready-out-of-the-box web app framework. Responses so far seem to fall into several camps:
- "I agree completely, that's why I'm adding yet another framework to the mix!" (I'm waiting for someone to stand up at PyCon and say, "Web App People's Front? We're the People's Front of Web Apps!")
- Sneering: "Bah---Rails is impure! Unclean! We must keep our Python pure and elegant!" (Yeah... look how well that worked for Scheme. In my experience, most programmers value usefulness over elegance.)
- Whistling in the dark. For example, Ian Bicking said, "...diversity isn't so bad if we can just make a compelling infrastructure experience." I respectfully disagree: right now, the diversity in this area is preventing any of the frameworks from becoming mature enough to be credible among the "I need to get it done now" developers I talk to. (Quick, how many copies of "Programming WebWare/Twisted/CherryPy/whatever" or "The WW/T/CP/whatever Cookbook" are on pre-order? Probably 3500 less than the equivalent RonR books.)
It also gives the impression of confusion and bickering, which is lethal when you're trying to persuade someone in the commercial world to adopt something that doesn't come with a 1-800 customer support line.
- Frank acknowledgment of RonR's strengths (e.g. Peter Hunt's very welcome post --- Peter, I would have thanked you directly, but I didn't have an email address).
RonR is proof that new web app frameworks can displace existing tools like PHP. It's also proof that the existence of a lightweight ready- out-of-the-box don't-have-to-install-eleven-packages-to-make-it-work yes-the-tutorials-are-up-to-date no-you-don't-have-to-write-lots-of- idiosyncratic-XML-templates-or-configuration-files framework is important enough that large numbers of programmers will choose (or switch) their language on that basis alone.
So, any bets we'll still be moaning about this after PyCon'06?
Greg
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