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

[Jeremy Hylton]

On 4/28/05, Greg Wilson <gvwilson at cs.utoronto.ca> wrote:
> My solution is for Guido (or someone with equivalent authority)
> to appoint someone "Benevolent Dictator for the Web for One Year", with
> a mandate to put together something that has all the features that are
> getting Rails so much attention.  Whatever s/he comes up with in that
> year will then be shipped as part of the 2.X release of Python in 2006.

I don't think this is a good idea for several reasons.  Let's imagine
we could go back in time four years and tell the Ruby community the
same thing:  Appoint someone to research a popular new way of building
web applications and add that to the next release of Ruby.  What would
the result have been for Ruby?  Would it now look like PHP?  I don't
know, but I'm skeptical of a solution that copies an existing popular
tool.

I don't think a large web programming toolkit belongs in the Python
distribution.  If anything, go the other way around and package a
particular version of Python with this web toolkit.

I'm also skeptical of a plan that sets out to build the one right way
that everyone will use.  I don't know anything about the history of
Rails, but I'm guessing that the project didn't start because Matz
said "Build the official web toolkit for Ruby users" and it didn't
become successful because Ruby programmers adopted it.  That is, I
imagine it became popular because people liked it and not because
people agreed in advance that the would like it.

Jeremy

PS  None of the top 10 Google results for "web programming" mentioned
Python (PHP is second).  Four of the top 10 results for "web
programming frameworks" mention Python, including Ian's blog post
about why web programming matters.  Maybe we'd do better if we didn't
have the frameworks <0.2 wink>.