Dr. Matt Lee (mattl)

On his blog, Ivan Krstic talks about the fact that Ruby is making headway on the web, in a way that Python never managed.

…if you’re writing a Python web framework that will out-rail Rails, please give up now.

As someone who wrestled with Zope for some time, I share this sentiment. I am now about 9000% more productive with TextMate and Rails. I’m even able to pick up Ruby quicker than I picked up Python.
Case in point – yesterday, Shaun and I were fiddling with SQLUserFolder, trying to get it to write an encrypted password to the database – the product (Zope plugins are called products), wasn’t working, instead writing some non, SHA crap to the database.
My resulting Ruby program:-

require 'digest/sha1'
print Digest::SHA1.hexdigest("hello world") + "\n"

Compare this to my resulting PHP and Python programs:-

<? echo sha1("hello world") . "\n"; ?>

import sha
print sha.new("hello world").hexdigest()

All three scripts are largely the same – so, what is it that makes Python for the web so bad, when compared to Ruby? It’s surely not the language?