Kind of unrelated to the topic.. but I recently checked out Django for the first time ever recently (I know, 5 years late) - and was impressed. It has a lot of the things I like in web development with mostly sane defaults (most insane thing found so far: Closing database connection after each request, really?). Edit - Yes I know you can change config to keep connection open, but as a default for prod mode it seemed rather weird ;)

Still fighting the internal battle that I know I like better compile time checking (ala Scala), but having changes happen so fast in dev is pretty freakin nice...