What do you want in a new web framework?

[Cliff Wells]

On Thu, 2006-08-24 at 04:04 +0000, Tim Roberts wrote:
> Cliff Wells <cliff at develix.com> wrote:
> >
> >But there are interesting things in Ruby (and Ruby 2 should take care of
> >lots of warts Ruby 1.8 has) that Python could learn from.  All-in-all,
> >Ruby is mostly as good as Python in most ways and better than Python in
> >a couple key ways.
> 
> ...but you can't READ Ruby code.  

Yeah, that's one of the big reasons I haven't seriously considered
trying it.  It's expressive, got interesting features... and appears
unreadable to me.  I'm usually pretty good at deciphering most
languages, even if I haven't used them before, but Ruby is one of the
exceptions.

> One of the things I like best about
> Python is that, like Cobol, you can read Python code like prose (or poetry
> ;) and, for the most part, know what the code does, even without being a
> Python guru.  I have not had the same experience with Ruby.  There are
> special characters in there that make the program say something I can't
> immediately discern.

There's the line noise aspect, but also some things are just expressed
in what appears (to me) to be rather non-idiomatic ways.  But I suppose
it depends on your background.  A rather brilliant friend of mine with a
Smalltalk background thinks that the Ruby reads like a novel. Shrug. He
also reads Japanese, so maybe that's a factor ;-)

> To be sure, people whose opinions I trust (one of whom is Cliff Wells) have
> said that Ruby is great, so I suppose I need to look again.  I just haven't
> had the same "aha!" experience that I had with Python.

Thanks for the vote of confidence. I have lots of opinions, but even I
only trust a few of them ;-)

I think Ruby has great things and I'm certain it's a great fit for many
people.  But I'm with you 100% on Python's readability.  I just wish we
could have the great things from both.

This brings us back around to the web framework debates.  For many
people Ruby "fits" their brains and for others Python does.  I think
frameworks are similar.  I tried Django and while I thought it was a
great product, it simply didn't "fit" how I think about that problem
domain.  TurboGears on the other hand did, and really, it helped clarify
a few things I had vague notions about.  I think we'll do better not
trying to shoehorn people into one or the other.

Regards,
Cliff
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