Comments on: Rails is the best thing that ever happened to Python

By: -= Linkage 2007.03.05 =-

-= Linkage 2007.03.05 =- — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 15:37:39 +0000

[…] Rails is the best thing that ever happened to Python?
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By: sayap

sayap — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 01:09:04 +0000

Joseph,

Perhaps it is because list comprehension is so intuitive in Python that it doesn’t need some special built-in functions?

See http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=98196

By: Joseph Method

Joseph Method — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 19:16:58 +0000

Perhaps my point about list comprehension should have been that Ruby doesn’t need a special syntax, because collect/map is so intuitive.

By: Joseph Method

Joseph Method — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 19:08:09 +0000

I agree with Kristleifur, that Python is “a joy to program in” only for people who are already used to it. Abstract, hypothetical reasons why Ruby can’t do X well don’t really matter, because Python syntax and semantics suck (why anyone thinks import something is more or less magical than require ‘something’ is beyond me). Ruby teaches you to use lambdas right out of the box while in Python they’re considered advanced play because of the awful (magical) syntax for creating them. Ruby doesn’t even have a name for list comprehension because there’s an actual method on lists called (mysteriously) ‘collect’. All the arguments made in favor of Python can be made for PHP (good community, it scales, it’s mature, “understandable” idioms), but that doesn’t sway pure Python developers, because they don’t like thinking in PHP.

By: Lucas

Lucas — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 04:47:06 +0000

Sure, Antonio. But I think that this is a problem with people. “Blind” people tend to sell their favorite language/platform/framework as a silver bullet. Even in the Python community.

Or you could just say that Rails really is a solution for all the problems you had before using it. Now you got new ones. That’s software development after all. 😉

By: raggi

raggi — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 12:49:45 +0000

To be honest, eventmachine, revactor etc are not as immature as you may be giving them credit for.

We’re using eventmachine in production, and it’s massively more stable than a comparable service written in pure ruby using threads or whatever processing paradigm on the pure ruby socket interfaces. (And I learned this the real hard way).

You’d be right in saying that there’s a signficant requirement for more protocol implementations and framework extensions for use by ‘the common man’, but other than that these async frameworks are pretty damn good.

Kirk Haines among other people, has software that will happily drown a 100mbit pipe. Almost no one who posted here ever fills a 100mbit pipe. Performance under such conditions is largely a non-issue, and it’s pretty damned fast anyway.

Developer purpose often leads to the state of the libs, and here’s another good example, for python this time:
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Eventlet

Now, with regard to benchmarking of these things, there’s never a substitute for proper design. You can’t expect the framework to deal with attempts to send 5 byte packets on it’s own. That’s something the developer needs to consider at design time, whether thats behavioral design at implementation time, or design time considerations for teams that know they’ll be stressing a system.

By: Antonio Cangiano

Antonio Cangiano — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 14:50:55 +0000

Lucas wrote: Ruby/Rails is more about marketing than about code? Oh, c’mon! That’s not even an argument.

That’s not what I said nor what I meant. Rails is an incredible framework and Ruby is my favorite language. They are both fantastic. But you must admit that, sometimes, Rails was sold by some as the solution to all the web development problems, which is not accurate.

By: Kristleifur

Kristleifur — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 10:26:03 +0000

Hi,

I get so angry at Python that I can’t program in it. It’s a personality defect that I have. If I can’t program, threads and IO don’t matter.

Personally, I’ll pick Ruby’s shaky elegance over Python’s diesel-powered buttplug any chance I get.

That’s why I’d hail Twisted Matrix, whatever that is, if it’s presented to me in Ruby: “Hey, a version of Twisted Matrix that I’ll actually use!”

Ps.: don’t forget to parse the whitespace in this message. It totally changes its meaning.

By: Michael DiBernardo

Michael DiBernardo — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:49:36 +0000

It’s funny… Rails is precisely the reason I learned Python. My reasoning was thus:

(a) I need a web framework.
(b) I am so tired of perl.
(c) Rails looks cute, and there’s so much hype. Let’s check it out.
(d) I don’t really want to learn a language for just one framework. (Ruby is good, don’t get me wrong. I used to program in Eiffel. But…)
(e) Let me check out python again.
(f) After some fudging, I like python more than Ruby. Also, there seems to be more _general_ usage of python than there is of Ruby out there.
(g) Oooh, what’s this Django thing?

The end result is that, 9 months later, I’m deeply in love with python and I’ve written four substantial django-powered apps.

Thanks Rails!

By: Lucas

Lucas — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 02:45:51 +0000

Ruby/Rails is more about marketing than about code? Oh, c’mon! That’s not even an argument.

Rails was just code, then it got attention and then the marketing begun: you can’t “sell” a framework without marketing, most decision makers aren’t coders. It’s all about balance.

And that’s the “problem” with Django. It has the good (“beautiful”) code, but it lacks the marketing (I’m talking about good marketing, not about business bullshit) or someone like DHH. 🙂