> I suspect the best/healthiest ecosystem is probably somewhere in between that of Ruby and JavaScript. Rails may have ultimately hurt Ruby by its dominance, ju

> I suspect the best/healthiest ecosystem is probably somewhere in between that of Ruby and JavaScript. Rails may have ultimately hurt Ruby by its dominance, just as the current volatility in JavaScript tools seems to drive some people away (or at least add frustration). I think this description matches the Python web ecosystem quite well. Historically there were the Z(ope)-ish projects, which still exist and are being used (and they work quite nice); Django obviously dominated for a long time, but in more recent years some healthy competition ensued (Flask and it's highly modular approach for example, but also Pyramid), which resulted in a lot of reworking and improvement for all frameworks. Django now vs. Django 2010 is a vast difference in developer and user friendliness. Some specialized frameworks popped up (Tornado comes to mind), but overall there isn't a heavy fragmentation of the ecosystem (bad) but no one dominator either (bad).