There was another mildly amusing incident during the recent SoCal Piggies meeting.

Michael Carter was showing us his incredibly neat Web 3.0 / HTTP PUSH software, orbited, by demoing an interactive IRC client on the Web. He signed onto the ruby-on-rails IRC channel and (this being a Python meeting) asked "Is Python better than Ruby?"

The response, interestingly enough, was (and I paraphrase): "No. Ruby is more modern, and because it doesn't use whitespace, you don't have to use templates."

Well, that didn't make any sense to me, so I asked Michael to follow up with "what are templates?"

Next response? "In Python/Django, you need to use templates because Python isn't good for this stuff."

heh.

--titus

p.s. Should I hedge? Sure. "No, I don't think every Ruby person is so silly as to conflate 'Ruby' with 'Ruby on Rails' or 'Python' with 'Django'."

Legacy Comments

Posted by Michael carter on 2007-07-30 at 06:32.

I think that many of the people who use ruby on rails have a tough
time differentiating between the language and the framework. I got
into python via Zope and at first they seemed one and the same to me,
particularly with Zope's through-the-web scripting stuff. I suppose
its a common misconception for newcomers to any framework who aren't
already familiar with the language.

Posted by rgz on 2007-07-30 at 10:31.

You also don't have significant whitespace in php, perl or java and
yet web frameworks with templates exists for those languages.
Whoever complains about python not being good for the web has to
explain the popularity of smarty, HTML::Template and velocity.
Templates are a good idea regardless of the language.     And if you
complain about such wonders as shrubbery you would complain about
anything.    Also, significant whitespace is an obstacle to automated
writting of python, not **from** python.    Could you tell them
please?