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Basically, you're seeing just as much Python as ever. However, because Rubyists aren't making such a spectacle of themselves, you don't hear as much about Ruby/
by Kaizyn 16y ago
Basically, you're seeing just as much Python as ever. However, because Rubyists aren't making such a spectacle of themselves, you don't hear as much about Ruby/Rails as you used to. And what you do hear doesn't get as much traction as it used to because after several years of ruby news the community has grown more tired of it.
- shadowsun7 16y agoI think you're right on this one. The idea that Python is suddenly experiencing a reemergence doesn't feel right to me - it makes more sense to talk about this trend in terms of relative activity. Note: I use and love Python, and I'm doing my startup in Python, but I'll admit that I don't know much about the Ruby community. I will say, however, that we decided early on not to use RoR because of its scaling issues.
- binomial 16y agoSubtle trolling.
- shadowsun7 16y agoWas that a self-referential comment? I'm not sure how you're contributing to the discussion here.
- binomial 16y agoI was trying to see to it that people don't respond to the trolling as if it were a real question. If it was a real question, perhaps the person needs to do some research.
- binomial 16y agoOops, I did not realize that you are the same person who I had replied to till later. Well, I'll assume you aren't trolling then, but realize that many shared the sentiment for good reason (the comment was at 5 points surprisingly, before I made the last, very stupid reply). The reason would be that there have been thousands of wasted programmer hours due to discussions initiated by someone saying "rails can't scale", when they obviously don't know what they're talking about, so it does come off as trollish. It became a something many said because of Twitter's scaling problems, which is probably how you heard about it. But later, it became clear and commonly accepted among the community that Twitter's scaling problems did not stem from rails itself, but other parts of its infrastructure. Saying "rails doesn't scale" really doesn't make too much sense, because scaling the application layer is arguably the easiest part of scaling: essentially you add more app servers, and load balance between them. The hard part is scaling the database etc. In Twitter, at first they had a lot of issues because the queuing software they wrote wasn't great for their workloads and was pretty slow. And there are a ton of other moving parts as well in the application and the team must have kept hitting walls in all the various parts. They may have even had some rails issues at some point, but that's a far cry from saying it can't scale. And anyways, if you want to keep it light weight, I'd use one of the smaller Ruby frameworks. You really can't go wrong with Sinatra.
- shadowsun7 16y agoWelcome to HN, binomial. You can assume that we're not trolling (most of the time). Thank you for the clarification.
- mikeklaas 16y agoThe situation with writing web apps with Python has changed dramatically over the last 3-4 years and I think you are giving it too little credit. Back then, there wasn't one obvious place to start with web app development with Python. Frameworks existed, sure, but there were too many and none were as good as rails. Django changed that, arguably helped along by Guido's pronouncement as the "official" way to go.
- Tichy 16y agoIs Django really good, though? Everytime I look at it I end up thinking "eeeew, why do they do it like that". That it is popular is no indicator - PHP is popular, too. Trying to remember some examples that I didn't like. The ORM mapper was ugly, and I think the templating system is really inflexible - like you can not use it isolated from Django, or it couldn't do "inheritance", or something like that.
- simonw 16y agoI think it's good. (Disclaimer: I'm a co-creator of Django) The ORM is Django's most powerful component, IMO. The syntax can look a bit off-putting at first (the double underscore stuff) but it's amazing how productive it can be at the sort of queries that make up the bulk of any web app. I guess maybe it's an acquired taste. Inheritance is a key concept of the template system, and one of its most useful features. You absolutely can use the template system outside of Django, but it's not available as a separate package so you still end up with the rest of Django is a dependency - definitely not ideal. Jinja is a very neat rewrite of Django's template system that is available as a separate package.
- Tichy 16y agoThanks for the info. It's been a while since I looked at it, and I certainly only did a very superficial evaluation.