Clearly the Ruby/Rails folks are making an effort to place themselves as an easy-to-learn first language for people who might otherwise drift into the rather awkward template-first way of thinking that is PHP.
I note that the Rails people are closely affiliated with the 37signals people who in turn are closely linked with some advertising professionals. Python people don't really think that way. As a community we really seem to inherit the open source dysfunction of trying harder to impress each other than to reach out to the rest of the world. The problem is that this makes for amazing brilliance that is more or less invisible to most of the world. This leaves me believing that the commercial future is probably brighter for Ruby vs Python. This won't affect the fact that Python is probably still going to prevail in the scientific community, since scientists aren't all that susceptible to promotion. That being the case I don't think I myself will jump ship. Since I am casting my lot with Python rather than Ruby, I think we should take the friendly rivalry seriously rather than just shrugging it off. Python MUST attract some of the most promising novice programmers, and I believe that was part of its original design. As a consequence Python MUST settle on a strong web framework that includes the best of the existing frameworks, and polish it for maximum accessibility as well as power. Just on the basis of momentum rather than any strong technical argument (which I am not well-qualified to make) I suggest we consider settling on Django and doing what we can to improve it and its documentation. mt -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
