Looking for a language/framework

[Alex Martelli]

walterbyrd <walterbyrd at iname.com> wrote:
   ...
> I consider php to be an abombination, the backward compatibility issues
> alone are reason enough to make me hate it. Rail looks promising, but
> it's difficult to find inexpensive hosting that supports rails.

What's your budget?  DreamHost offers Rails hosting for $7.95 per month,
which definitely falls within what I would call "inexpensive", just for
example.  I'm sure you can find others in similar price ranges.

> I like python much better, but I'm not certain it's as well suited for
> web developement. I'm not sure how th e apache module thing works. I am
> using shared hosting, they provide python, but I'm not sure how limited
> I'll be.

What Python server-side frameworks does your shared hosting service
support?  Or do they only offer Python as a CGI language?

> I wouldn't even mind the steep learning curves, so much, except, it
> seems to me that anything developed with one framework, would not work
> with another. So if I changed my mind about which framework, I'd have
> to start all over again - re-learning everything, re-writing
> everything. Of course, everybody says their framework is the best. But
> how can I know for sure? I don't have time to try them all.

Nobody does, which is the main advantage of Rails -- it so dominates the
scene of web frameworks for Ruby, that nobody seriously wonders what
framework to pick for that language (there exist others, but their "mind
share" is close to zero).  Python frameworks may interoperate at several
levels (e.g. through the WSGI middleware layer) but that's not the same
as having a single framework.

OTOH, different frameworks may cater for different audiences: at one
extreme, the webjockey who knows and loves the underlying technologies,
from HTTP to SQL, and only wants high productivity without (what he or
she perceives as) "cruft" on top and definitely without any conceptual
blockage impeding access to the underlying technologies when that access
is wanted; at the other extreme, somebody who doesn't even know the
difference between SQL and HTTP, doesn't want to learn anything hard,
and just wants to point and grunt and make three websites a day -- and,
of course, anything in-between.

For example, I've never seen an "object-relational mapping" (technical
term for cruft that tries to avoid people having to learn and use SQL)
which doesn't drive me into a murderous, foam-at-mouth rage in a very
short time -- I *WANT* my SQL, I *LOVE* SQL, it's *WAY* more powerful
and suitable for access to data than all those simulated "OO DB" people
lay on top of it (of course, that does depend on having a REAL
relational DB underneath, not, say, MySQL;-).  Other people disagree
very, very deeply with my preferences (as proven by the existence of a
begazillion ORMs, including general-purpose ones as well as ones that
are part of web-application frameworks).  How is a poor web framework to
make both groups happy (me on one side, all the rest of the world on the
other;-) without becoming ridiculously complex and ungainly?


Alex