danieldon

Indeed. Sass and Compass have been doing this for years. Using mixins for CSS framework rules so markup stays semantic is basically the core concept behind Compass.

That's certainly one leading theory, and probably the most likely. However, that happened earlier in the summer, a month or more before he actually shut everything down. There are other possible theories, eg, in his last tweets he lamented about feeling left behind by the progress of open source, or the theory that he planned it all along based on the Poignant Guide's ending.

No matter which of those reasons it was, it's pretty baseless to claim that he took down all of his websites, comics and open source software in a variety of languages including one he created due to some mysterious, unmentioned, irreconcilable beef the Ruby community, especially considering he was one of the most influentual people in defining that community.

    Ruby still lacks in scalability and speed compared to Perl

Ruby is faster than Perl, according to the language shootout:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-lang...

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/which-programming-lan...

    if I remember correctly

You don't. _why left open source for unknown reasons.

    89033 modules

Only 21694 distributions, though. The analogue in Ruby is a gem and RubyGems already has 19502.

That would conflict with "Apple doesn't have to spend their time discussing with you about legal dispute among copyright holders."

I look forward to your campaign to change

    hg init project

to

    mercurial-admin.py startrepository project

Those Ruby developers and their magic. Or something.

I haven't, but I know it works fine. Heroku is more of a Rack host than a Rails host, so any Rack-based framework (AFAIK, all Ruby frameworks at this point) run seamlessly on it.

    What happens when you do a django template "your way" 
    or "they way we can do it in 2 hours instead of 12"?

I've worked on a lot of projects and can't imagine the situation where you'd have this kind of a variation in time to create two remotely similar versions of a template. If you are talking about a fully designed template + CSS + JS, then you could possibly get up to 12 hours, but there would be no way to shorten that to 2 hours without doing something completely different.

    This is a comment about the non-web components of the 
    language.

And this entire discussion is about web development. The OP, who already knows multiple non-web-centric languages, asked specifically about web frameworks.

    The Django community is perhaps more opinionated. The 
    actual software isn't.

Depends on what you mean by the software. The framework overall is very opinionated, even if you can use parts of it in a modular way.

    The actual software has strong opinions (aka, 
    intentional inflexibility)

Let me take the opportunity to give you a heads up that Rails 3 has been out for months now and is widely used in production. One of the most significant design goals of Rails 3 was intentional flexibility.

Have you looked at Padrino? I recently experimented with it and was surprised that it was an extremely awesome middle ground, to the point where I'll probably use it for my next project. It's very fast, close to Rack and easy to use with Rack middleware, has Rails-style view helpers, has sinatra-style controllers, very simple and elegant mountable apps, a focus on DB agnosticism, among many other things

I don't presume to know your work environment, but personally I work on my own projects and do contract work and, in my experience, taking on debt is usually a sign that there's a problem with the requirements and estimates, so I usually change those before making the code less maintainable (which, IMO, is usually a case of treating the symptom).

Regardless, I'm weary of claims that controller-level (django view level) code is a major pain point in Rails. In some ways it's actually easier since you can make fewer decisions by making them resource centric, but even deviating from that is as simple as map "/path", :to => "controller#action".

Rails/Django controllers/view and routing/urls aren't as elegant as micro-frameworks like Flask and Sinatra or not-so-micro-frameworks like Padrino, but they aren't anything close to serious stumbling blocks (though maybe routing to a very small degree in resource-centric Rails 2). Every blocking issue I've had with either framework has been on a deeper level. In Rails pre-3, it was usually configuration-related when trying to do something too unconventional. In Django, it's when trying to deviate from the overall Django philosophy and use something other than the included batteries.

    Python will be more useful if you decide to do
    something with the language other than ruby on rails

If by "ruby on rails" you mean "anything to do with web development, deployment and server config management," then you'd have a point. Of course, when the context is a discussion about web development, then whether you can easly write OpenGL apps is irrelevant. Good developers also don't just learn one language and try to use it for everything.

    with it as well (SPSS, SciPy, NumPy and various other
    things)

That has effectively nothing to do with which web framework to work with. The OP has already worked with Java, C# and Objective-C. Assuming he comes across a project that requires something like SciPy or NumPy and assuming he doesn't use something from one of the languages he already knows, I'm guessing that he, like most hackers, wouldn't have a problem learning Python or another language no matter what web framework or language he had been using recently for web development.

You have that completely backwards. If you are coding your Python like that, you are doing it wrong and almost certainly drawing the ire of the people you work with.

How is Django not dramatically more opinionated? It is, we all know it and we know that it's a virtue in that it produces consistent, readable code code. Why are you trying to pretend otherwise?

With Django, there's a whole philosophy behind the right way to do templates. There's a whole explicitly written philosophy behind the specific coding conventions. Whole sections of the framework still assume you are using SQL, ideally Postgres.

Meanwhile, Rails 3 doesn't just support, it increasingly encourages doing things however you want to. Not only that, the community accepts it. Try to use anything but Django templates in your Django project and you'll likely get strong resistence from others on your team or someone who picks up the project after you.

    I'd still go python over ruby, cause I'll take libraries

I use both Ruby and Python for web development and, frankly, this is utter nonsense. Even in situations where there is a larger quantity of libraries, such as template engines again, it doesn't translate to greater breadth of viable options since the widely used Python templating engines are mostly variations on the same theme. There is no widespread adoption of something like Haml because, again, the Python community is opinionated. There are good reasons for this, but if you like a template language like Haml and work on anything other than personal projects, you are SOL.

In general, there are far more situations when using Python for web development where I'm pining for a Ruby library than vice-versa. Thankfully some, like Sass and Chef, don't require that the project itself is in Ruby.

    the most recent post is more than a year old

It gets asked every month or so, the last time I remember was just last month: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1830063

And I'm going to refer to my comment from that discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1830895

Right, it doesn't make the hotmail situation look better, it just reinforces how bad they both are.

What's also horrible about the yahoo policy is that there is that you can reactive the account (at least for some period of time), but the email archives are deleted. This happened to one of my accounts.

According to the docs and the developer comments they do get deleted. Presumably using the account with xbox live and other services is what's keeping it active, even if you don't log into hotmail directly.

I've also already experienced both situations. When the @live.com accounts became available I registered my name, never used it, eventually forgot to keep logging in to keep it active and it got deleted. Meanwhile, the account I use for xbox live stayed active even though I hadn't logged in to hotmail in at least 2 years until a couple weeks ago.

    I don't think I ever would've seen as many pictures of 
    the random events in the lives of my family and friends 
    without Facebook

That hasn't been my experience at all. Seriously. Savy people use/used flickr, others used Myspace, and handful used photobucket, others use/used awful photo sharing sites like kodak's and others use/used email. In my experience, most of the additional volume of photos on my wall are from people I should probably defriend since I barely know who they are.

    I think that "random nonsense" is more valuable to 
    people that you're assuming

It seems to me, both by looking at my own wall and what people post online, that the nonsense is at most a simple diversion, just like many other diversions that exist and have existed for years. Despite the fact that many of my friends and family members are productive people who are well-known in their respective fields, I have yet to see anything of any substance actually occur on facebook. The closest thing to actual substance in that regard would be events. And the computer illiterates? The volume hasn't changed, they just post their stuff to facebook rather than CCing everyone in their address book 1-3 times a day.

    People know more about the lives of their friends and
    family than they ever have before

Wow. I couldn't disagree more. Event notifications are probably the only thing that is substantially more useful in facebook as far as I can tell. Aside from that, the only additional knowledge I've gained from facebook is that a handful of people who I barely remember from high school really like reposting stuff from r/pics. My family has been active on facebook for years, but it's had nothing remotely close to a revolutionary impact on how we communicate.

The content of the URL field is dependent on the tab. It arguably makes far more sense to have this strong relationship represented by containing the URL field in the tab itself rather than having a global URL field in one part of the window with content that changes as different tabs are selected in another part of the window.

    european citizens...people...people...them...innocent people...them

Why are you using plurals? Where did the cables discuss anyone fitting this description other than Khaled el-Masri?

I'm a 30-somthing urban professional and almost no one I know still uses MSN or AIM. Tons of people use gchat and gmail, including people who used facebook first. Looking at my adium contacts right now, there are more people signed into gchat than facebook chat, only one signed into MSN and AIM.

My wife's friends are the same way. Sure, lots of them have facebook accounts, but all of her friends and business contacts, new and old, email and gchat regularly. She doesn't even have a facebook account yet and has no intention of ever setting one up.

In fact, I feel less pressure to use facebook these days than I did a year or two ago. I don't even go on it anymore other than when I'm working on apps that use the graph api. My wall is filled with stuff I don't care about and if I want to contact someone I email, chat or text them.

Regarding the outsourcing thing, it's clear that even they aren't getting high quality. I'm checking out their Convert Units app, for instance, and the drum scrolling and selection is totally broken, although it works just enough to still function.

It's interesting, however, that the poor quality apparently isn't stopping people from using it. Part of it might be that people don't expect much out of a free app, so if it's broken they just deal with it.

Honestly, I think these "Ask HN: X vs X?" posts should be strongly discouraged here. The Rails vs Django threads get posted at least once a month, often more frequently, and it's beyond tiresome. They already get flagged and killed half the time, but people still post in them as if it's totally normal to have the same question posted week after week.

Edit: Instead of downvoting, explain why you think this same discussion needs to be rehashed month after month, sometimes week after week. When it comes to other topics we have no problem reminding people to search HN rather than ask the same questions repeatedly.

I gave up coffee a year and a half ago. My current daily drink pattern:

* 8-13:30 - lots of water

* 13:30-19:30 - steamed milk

* 19:30-22:00 - water

* 22:00 - 1:00 - wine (usually italian red)

It goes above the Kármán line (100km/62 miles), which is the international standard for the boundary:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n_line

Proclamations predicting the imminent decline of Apple got old many years ago.

It's mildly interesting to watch the quality of submissions on HN absolutely node dive on the weekends.

It's an interesting concept.

The "Hold down the left mouse button to start moving" line seems problematic to me, as are the other "mouse" references. I have not has a mouse for year, nor do I have a left mouse button. At least some visitors will be (in fact, have been) on mac laptops or touchscreen devices. I'd recommend something along the lines of "drag the page to move around."

    miss out a lot of social interaction

http://i.imgur.com/EpTdz.png from http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ...

This has been my experience as well.