Why is Ruby on Rails more popular than Django?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Wed, 06 Mar 2013 10:03:14 -0800, Jason Hsu wrote:

> My questions:
> 1.  Why is Ruby on Rails much more popular than Django? 2.  Why is there
> a much stronger demand for Ruby on Rails developers than Django/Python
> developers? 

Fashion.

Demand for technology is usually driven more by copying what everyone 
else does than by merit.

Consider: Fred is a busy manager who has to start a new website and is 
dissatisfied with the technology he's previously been using. Does he have 
time to learn Ruby on Rails, Django, CherryPy, Drupal, and thirty other 
web technologies, to systematically and objectively decide on the best 
language for the website? Of course not. Even evaluating *two* 
technologies is probably beyond his time or budget constraints. So he 
does a search on the Internet, or reads trade magazines, or asks his 
peers, to find out what everyone else is doing, then copies them.

"Oh, they're using Ruby on Rails, it must be good." So now he decides to 
use Ruby on Rails, advertises for RoR developers, and the cycle continues.

But is RoR actually better for his specific situation? Doubtful. 
Presumably RoR is better for *some* specific jobs. At some point, early 
in RoR's history, it must have been a *good* solution. But unlikely to be 
the *best* solution, just better than whatever people were using before.

And so RoR will be the easy choice, not the best choice, until such time 
as RoR is no longer satisfying developers. And then there will be a 
sudden, and random, phase-change to some other tool, which will become 
the next easy choice.


> 3.  If Doppler Value Investing were your project instead of
> mine, would you recommend the Ruby on Rails route or the Django route?

Neither. I'd be rather tempted to try doing it in CherryPy. But then, 
what do I know, I'm just as much a follow of fashion as the next guy.



-- 
Steven