Need a compelling argument to use Django instead of Rails

Ray ray_usenet at yahoo.com
Mon Jul 24 06:41:55 EDT 2006


I just moved to another company that's mainly a Java/.NET shop. I was
happy to find out that there's a movement from the grassroot to try to
convince the boss to use a dynamic language for our development!

Two of the senior developers, however, are already rooting for Ruby on
Rails--although they haven't tried RoR themselves. When I suggested
Django, they went like, "what's that?".

I said, "It's like the Python counterpart of RoR".

"Nah, we're not interested in Python."

I think they are already predisposed to RoR simply because of RoR's
visibility (i.e.: at my workplace everybody knows RoR but nobody knows
about Django unless they've used Python as well). So far the arguments
I can think of:

1. The investment of learning Python will be a good investment because
it transfer to platforms that we've already supported, i.e.: JVM and
.NET CLR (using Jython and IronPython). Ruby's availability on this
platform is not as mature--JRuby is still at 0.9 and I don't think
IronRuby is coming out anytime soon :)

2. Python is a much more mature language than Ruby--it's been around
since ages ago and as such has a lot more tools, articles, and other
resources than Ruby. It is also the language being used by
high-visibility company like Google, with the creator of the language
himself working there.

3. Python emphasizes readability instead of cleverness/conciseness.

4. What else? I haven't tried RoR so I can't argue meaningfully on
whether using Django will put us at an advantage.

Can you help me with my argument? Meanwhile I think I'll give RoR a try
as well.

Thank you,
Ray




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