I’ve been intrigued by all the hoopla surrounding Ruby on Rails. It’s a web application framework that is described by its practitioners in exactly the same manner as Cocoa is lauded. They say that the framework takes care of nearly everything, so you just need to write the glue and functionality. I don’t know how accurate that is since I’ve never used either. I haven’t bothered trying Ruby on Rails because the installation process sounds like a tedious pain. Sure, my host now supports Ruby on Rails but I don’t want to have to do all my development on a remote server.
Now there’s a similar framework available for Python called Django. Python is a language that is nearly ubiquitous in the Unix world and has some language features that I really like. I think that learning Python would have much greater utility than learning Ruby, even though Ruby on Rails is hot, hot, hot right now.
[NOTE: There’s also another Python framework that more explicitly tries to emulate Ruby on Rails: Subway. {via}]
[UPDATE (7/17/2005): I thought of another reason to learn Python over Ruby: PyObjC. It’s a Python bridge to the Cocoa libraries. That would provide a nice transition to using Objective C, which is a direction I’d like to eventually head.]
[UPDATE (7/18/2005): Simon Willison, one of the creators, shares the backstory.]