Joel Spolsky writes about language wars in an interesting post about web application development choices.
He includes Python (well, half Python) into the big four (er, three and a half) options, because supposedly it's only halfway between "safe" and "interesting":
"...the bottom line is that there are three and a half platforms
(C#, Java, PHP, and a half Python) that are all equally likely to make
you successful, an infinity of platforms where you're pretty much
guaranteed to fail spectacularly when it's too late to change anything
(Lisp, ISAPI DLLs written in C, Perl), and a handful of platforms where
The Jury Is Not In, So Why Take The Risk When Your Job Is On The Line?
(Ruby on Rails)"
He goes on to discuss why he disses Ruby:
"I for one am scared of Ruby because (1) it displays a stunning antipathy towards Unicode and (2) it's known to be slow, so if you become The Next MySpace,
you'll be buying 5 times as many boxes as the .NET guy down the hall."
Well, practically minutes after his post, David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of Rails), offended by Rails being considered "immature", jumped in with a post of his own, where he proceeds to use his usual tactics of ad hominem attacks and ironical remarks to defend his creation. He doesn't even bother to answer Joel's two points, he just self-righteously goes after him.
While I don't agree with Joel and have been using Python for "serious business stuff" years before it got close to half a Python's length in Joel's web framework space, I think this arrogant attitude from the Rails mastermind is a little less mature than his web framework and not really helping his cause a lot.
As I read this I was thinking about the recent Django pronouncement by Guido. Even though sometimes his opinions are taken too seriously by some, it's nothing compared to some members of the Rails crowd, who immediately pat DHH in the shoulder and call Joel an asshat, insane and irrelevant in the comments to David's post.
This kind of reponse also brought to mind a recent post by Jacob Kaplan-Moss about evangelism in tech communities and holy wars. I sincerely hope Python web framework discussions continue to be as constructive as the comments to this Jacobian post show.
I agree with Jacob that moral arguments, where you assume that the tools you use are "right" and any others are "wrong", can make a lot of harm to a community. That's why sometimes I'm worried about the way some people make use of the terms "pythonic" and "unpythonic" in the Python world: they are very intangible and ambiguous terms, a little too close to words like undemocratic, unpatrotic and unholy. We should be careful with them.
Previous Topic
