Rails is the best thing that ever happened to Python | Hacker News Reader

Rails is the best thing that ever happened to Python

antoniocangiano.com

43 pointsacangiano17 comments

Open articleView on HN

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

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

thats exactly what i thought of

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?

Take a look at this link: http://www.vaporbase.com/var/uploads/File/rails-vs-django.pd...

Its a detailed comparison between the 2 frameworks.

You've ruled out all other Ruby options?

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

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).

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

I suspect its because Pylons has only relatively recently reached a stage where the code and documentation makes it simple enough to dive in and do great things without too much hassle.

I think Pylons has broader and deeper goals, so there has been a period of ramping up and getting the foundations in place, while the efforts put into Django's development have been focused on making specific things easy. Now Pylons is settling down and maturing, it will probably start to become much more widely used and appreciated. Also, Pylons may benefit from Django's recent boost in a similar way the link suggests Django is benefiting from Rails.

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.

"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.

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.

Does this mean RoR is a gateway drug?

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?)

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com