[Web-SIG] Re: Just lost another one to Rails

[Ian Bicking]

Greg Wilson wrote:
>  > > Greg Wilson wrote:
> 
>> > Well, here we all are, two weeks later...
> 
>  > Ian Bicking:
>  > [Subway on Paste]
>  > [Quixote on Paste]
>  > [Adrian Holovaty's stuff on Paste]
> 
> There's an old Chinese proverb (well, I was told it's Chinese): "If a
> hundred sages each tell you something different, the odds are that 
> they're all wrong."  I think WSGIKit/Paste is a great idea, but as long
> as a dozen people keep saying, "Use mine!  No, use mine!", the average 
> "need to get it done for Tuesday" web developer isn't going to touch any 
> of them.

In part it's because we're trying to answer the wrong question: "How 
should one do web programming in Python."  How boring.  We should be 
offering answers to things like "how do I create a web frontend to my 
existing database?" or "how do I provide a rich interactions to users?" 
or "how do I track incoming issues in my organization?"  Or whatever.

FWIW, I strongly suggested to Adrian that he call his project a CMS, not 
a web framework.  Sure, it is also a web framework, but who cares about 
another one of those?  It's interesting because it's a CMS, and it fills 
  a niche that isn't well filled right now.  I think that's how we 
should market our respective efforts generally, as systems to address 
specific problems that aren't related to Python.  If the problems are 
related to Python, then we don't have to convince anyone to use Python 
to solve them, do we?  Of course, I fall into this as well, as Paste is 
oriented towards the Python world.  But then, I'm comfortable if things 
built on Paste are advertised without mentioning Paste, just as they are 
advertised without mentioning Distutils or the zip file format.

My hope with Paste is that it helps chip away at the differences between 
these efforts.  There's a lot of uninteresting differences between 
frameworks, and I hope that Paste will grow to fill those parts of the 
stack.  I think that will help clarify important differences, where 
frameworks address different niches and deserve to coexist.

>  > Martijn Faassen:
>  > One can hardly expect people to drop the frameworks they've invested a
>  > lot in and all converge upon another one. You can't even expect Python
>  > programmers to actually stop creating new frameworks.
> 
> Expect? No.  Ask?  Yes.  Believe that if they don't, they'll be
> wondering in five years why Python has become the next Tcl, instead of
> the next Perl?  Absolutely.

Perl is already shaping up to be the next Tcl, IMHO.  But anyway, let's 
not be *too* melodramatic here.  If one framework pulls out ahead, it 
won't be because it sniped all the users of other Python frameworks. 
The numbers aren't large enough for sniping to gain you much.  It'll be 
because it gets Perl, PHP, Java, and VB/.NET developers.  Because it 
grabs people who didn't even know that deep down they were looking for 
Python.

-- 
Ian Bicking  /  ianb at colorstudy.com  /  http://blog.ianbicking.org