Python people attacked this "problem" in multiple ways. One was the emergence of competing frameworks like Django and Pylons. The other was to work hard on other product lifecycle stories. Some of which were influenced by what was gaining traction elsewhere (automated deployments, TDD). But, some new things also took flight in the Python world, like WSGI, which inspired similar endeavours (Rack, Plack/Perl).

Also, Python has better overall ecosystem. You want libraries for obscure (say HVAC) protocol, you have a better chance of finding it in Python, than in Ruby.

I think more developers relate to "don't be too clever" attitude taken by python than admitted among this crowd.

While RoR was busy redefining the entire Ruby ecosystem in it's own image, Python people were busy building stuff that were truly framework agnostic. Eg: Paste, WSGI, SQLAlchemy, Various templating languages like Jinja2, Mako.

It became a something many said because of Twitter's scaling problems, which is probably how you heard about it. But later, it became clear and commonly accepted among the community that Twitter's scaling problems did not stem from rails itself, but other parts of its infrastructure. Saying "rails doesn't scale" really doesn't make too much sense, because scaling the application layer is arguably the easiest part of scaling: essentially you add more app servers, and load balance between them. The hard part is scaling the database etc.

In Twitter, at first they had a lot of issues because the queuing software they wrote wasn't great for their workloads and was pretty slow. And there are a ton of other moving parts as well in the application and the team must have kept hitting walls in all the various parts. They may have even had some rails issues at some point, but that's a far cry from saying it can't scale.

The ORM is Django's most powerful component, IMO. The syntax can look a bit off-putting at first (the double underscore stuff) but it's amazing how productive it can be at the sort of queries that make up the bulk of any web app. I guess maybe it's an acquired taste.

Inheritance is a key concept of the template system, and one of its most useful features.

http://python.org/about/success/

http://python.about.com/od/gettingstarted/ss/whatispython_3....

I'd say your prof is pretty myopic.

Of the success stories, I particularly like this email about Python on NYSE from 2003:

Just because there is still more COBOL code running in the "real world" than there is C# code doesn't mean C# is 'radical'.

On the other hand, this very feature of powershell is amazingly powerfull, and allows you to lay out some things fare more logically than you could/would do in a text based shell, not to mention purely interface with more complex applications written in .net flawlessly (like doing a small GUI for your script in five seconds for example).

When you work with text, you're basically reinventing parsing at every pipe, and that, too makes no sense at all, for certain applications.

Well to set it apart from C#/F#, Powershell is dynamically typed, so you don't have to bother with the types of your objects.

To set it apart from Ironpython/ruby, or any other dynamic languages on the CLR, Powershell is made to be a shell scripting language. It means that tasks common in system administration are made to be simplified, that command to deal with the filesystem, processes, services and anything else on the system are builtins, and that it interacts very well with other apps, all things that are definitely not true with python or ruby. ipython brings you an inch closer, but with powershell you have the full thing.

> Apart from that, the power of the Unix shell isn't primarily the shell scripting language itself. It is the design of the programs it connects. You need small programs that do one thing.

Well those programs (grep, awk, sed, cat, and many others) are meant to be used in a shell environnement. With powershell, most if not all of the utility of those commands is replicated in equivalent commands. Those are not binary executables, but built-ins commands. But you can add new ones very easily, by coding them in powershell itself and adding them to your environnement in a way that has been thought out for that very purpose. I see no diminution in power, quite the contrary.

A little over a year ago I compared the jobs available for PHP, Django and Rails (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=805931). I did the same again 3 months ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1459119). A quick glance now shows the same trend and ratios (eg, simply hired has 20,125 PHP jobs, a 25% increase in 3 months; 5,334 Rails jobs, a 39% increase in 3 months; and 1,153 Django jobs, a 25% increase in 3 months).

Python 19,381 jobs http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=python&l=

Django 1,057 jobs http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=Django&l=

Django doesn't even dominate Python web related jobs if you accept "Python JavaScript" as a proxy for Python web related jobs: http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=Python+Javascript&l= gives you 4,671 jobs. Granted for many of them Python is not the main skill asked for.

Python is used by sysadmins and by scientists and even in financial services combined with C++. The combination of Python and C++ is requested 7,165 times. Compare that with "PHP C++" 3,051, "Ruby C++" 2,277, "Java C++" 25,675 and "C# C++" 13,045.

We are discussing web development jobs in this particular thread.

Django doesn't even dominate Python web related jobs

Yes, it does. SimplyHired: Django 1168, Pylons 143, TurboGears 18, Zope 96, web.py 5.

"Python JavaScript"...Granted for many of them Python is not the main skill asked for

                                  /-> Ruby on Rails
    C++ -> Java -> Perl -> PHP -> 
                                  \--> Python

By the time the Internet took off in the early 90s, Perl was already around and much more popular for this purpose.

    C++ --> Java --> Java
                 \--> Ruby on Rails
                  \--> Python/Django,etc…
                   \--> Javascript/Node.js/Sammy, etc…
                    \--> Scala/Lift                     
    PHP ----------------> (still going…)
    Perl -----> (???)

Ruby and PHP are direct descendants of Perl (which is still going). Ruby merged Perl with Smalltalk, roughly, and PHP merged Perl with a box of hammers (nevermind that not all problems involve nails), while removing a number of "hard" features in Perl, like first-class functions and closures.

Python is not on the C++/Java timeline, either, coming from ABC and others.

JavaScript is a descendant of Scheme (with C-like syntax).

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1749696

I interpreted the OP as trying to portray the progression of the "popular framework." I mean, the original Ask HN question was about what they see a lot of people choosing. I didn't like how this chart was portraying it as Ruby vs. Python.

My point is that it used to be PHP, Perl or Java and I think a lot of Java people have moved into Ruby, Python, Scala, etc... Meanwhile, there are still tons of people using PHP (unlike the OP's portrayal that that has stopped somehow). The question marks is to indicate that I don't know what's happened with Perl. I don't know if people still use it for web programming or not.

    Perl --> cgi
         \--> mod_perl
          \--> Mason
           \--> CGI::Application
            \--> Maypole --> Catalyst
                         \--> Jifty
                          \--> Mojolicious
                           \--> Dancer
                            \--> Squatting
                  \--> Continuity         
                   \--> PSGI / Plack [works with all the above]

"import flight" indeed.

I think it's just that Ruby enjoyed a brief surge of hype which pushed it to the forefront of the startup founders' mind; this has now ebbed a bit and Python use rises up to its natural level.

1. Google App Engine

2. Good webdev ecosystem (Django,etc.)

3. Science/Engineering and Machine Learning libraries - replacement to Matlab

I am big fan of Tornado - tornadoweb.org

From our perspective we use what we feel is best and we use more than one language on some of our projects. For example, we have a LOAD of legacy code in PHP and we use it still quite extensively for some of our sites. We use Python on some of the same sites for parsing and anything requiring heavy lifting.

Recently, I could kick off writing Cocoa apps in PyObjC with very little bit of learning to do. Within a day I feel confident on how to build my app.

I know a few profs who find it easy to train their students in Python and get them productive within a week. Even if its an electronics course. http://pykata.appspot.com/statements/

http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2008/4/11/rails-premieres-on-g....