Where Rails Rocks (and where Python doesn't)

I do not find this article any more compelling than the one it addresses. Most of these supposed superiorities are just plugins that the author likes that would work just as well in a Python framework, or straw-men. Call it, "Things I like about Ruby/Rails" and were cool. Frame it as "your language sucks" and it all comes off as fanboyism. I like Rails, but Django/Python works the way I do.

Saying that easy_install is "all kinds of broken" but in the next breath saying "Luckily there is Pip and Virtualenv" is a self-defeating argument. As it is, Ruby is well behind pip/virtualenv and the environmental isolation it gives you. And fabric / pip / virtualenv is a killer combo that makes deployment fast and easy. Rails has a Gemfile. pip has a stable-requirements.txt file. It's not rocket science.

Yes, Rake is great. Lots of things Python and Ruby projects can learn from one another. Rails 3 owes a whole lot to Django.

Haml/Sass: Meh. I don't need yet another layer of abstraction. But if I wanted to use these in Python, it would be trivial to do so. To each his own.

ActiveRecord vs Django: Use SQLAlchemy if you don't like the existing alternatives. It supports schema reflection just fine. As it is, lots if not most Django apps are written together with their database schema, and migrated together using South. For most projects, this is identical to how Rails is used.

Form Handling: I can use a ModelForm in Django, and do no mapping whatsoever. Accessing a Post dictionary is just as easy as a magically created attribute on a class. It's not that hard.

Templating: Jinja2 lets me import functions and class instances directly into a template's context, and thus keeps code where it belongs. Talk about religion all you want, but I actually work on projects that need a healthy separation between display and controller logic. Excellent coders that are also excellent designers are so rare that I have never met one. Every successful project I have been involved in has had excellent coders working with excellent designers who knew enough of one another's environments to work well together.

URL routes: Give me Regex any day!

Misc other supposed pluses: Cherry-picking. There are lots and lots of apps to pick and choose from in either platform. Some are good. Some are poor. The existence of a good app on one platform does not equate to a superiority over another platform.

Ughh, what's wrong with today's programmers, particularly Ruby programmers, and their unhealthy obsession with Internet fame? Want to link-bait your way up? Then learn from the masters. Remember Zed's "Rails is a Ghetto"? That's how you do it: sensationalist title must be followed by sensationalist content.

You mentioned easy_install sucks because it doesn't have uninstall. I assume you haven't had problems with Rails gem initializers where production and development environment differs by quite a lot?

pip + virtualenv is as difficult/easy as rvm. They both solve the exact same problems.

When it comes to script/console, what's so hard about python -i your/boot/file.py?

I like rakefile, but i could also live without it by using plain ol' ruby file.

Haml, isn't that whitespace sensitive? Just kid... Sass on the other hand, would be awesome if it could solve multiple IE quirks for me. There's a sass equivalent in Python called CleverCSS, I wonder if it could solve my IE problems.

ActiveRecord, I fail to see how different it is compared to SQLAlchemy declarative mode. Aren't they solving the same problem? I would also add, I fail to see the difference between Sequel and SQLAlchemy. They both are also solving the same problem.

Cannot say much about FormBuilder, I like my form in html.

Layout, partials, helpers, (arbitrary functions, defining blocks in templates, etc etc) There are so many Python template engines that solved all of this problems again and again. From another angle, you don't really need Rails for this. Merb and Sinatra could provide such separations as well.

All and all, it's cool for you to express your happiness using Ruby. But why bash others?

It's sad that many Ruby programmers think that their language is superior to another just because it's cool. I love Ruby, but I was interested in Python before learning Ruby. But somehow the language was not a fit. I think which language you like is just a matter of choice (and obviously depends on what you are doing). I would still jump at the opportunity of learning/using python because it's a pretty awesome language. :)

I'm also planning a follow up post covering what I don't really like and where the "magic" has burned me already. Similarly, I'd hope for that future post to act as a guide for Rails developers to get burned less frequently, a well as for Ruby library developers to do less burning.

"Only been working with Rails for two weeks; lots more goodness to uncover"

The one thing I've noticed about most Ruby Fan Boys is that they don't know the difference between a framework and a language. I say most because I have only talked with ONE person who knew that Rails was a framework.

There are an amazing number of frameworks for each language and there are also a lot of frameworks that draw reference from Rails. (Symfony comes to mind)