Ask HN: RubyOnRails or Django/Pylons?

Ruby is just fine for "just wanting to get it done"; we've used it to write an assembler that models opcodes as Ruby objects, a binary format description language, 3 different debuggers, a web proxy, a hex editor, a whole slew of crypto, a testing framework for the FIX trading protocol, Cocoa UIs, and god-knows-what-else. If you looked at any two of those packages, they might not appear to be written in the same language, let alone the same team.

Rails does not care what crazy Ruby stuff you have built for your specific problem domain. If you are doing graph-theoretic modeling with a custom Ruby library, Rails does not care and it will work fine.

But. If you have even the slightest difference of opinion with Rails as to how to handle a request or represent the URL parameters you're getting from browsers, you're in for a world of hurt. The things Rails has opinions about, it has strong opinions about. And it's a total passive-aggressive asshole about those opinions. It doesn't say no. It slowly punishes you instead. In particular, even though Rails 3 advertises that it has swappable ORMs, you'd be crazy to consider anything but ActiveRecord.

The nice thing about losing degrees of freedom is that you don't have to make decisions about them, so I tend to reject the idea that Python gets you home to your kids faster.

I work full time as a Rails developer, and I'd love to give a counterpoint to your obvious distate for Rails, but I have no idea what you're even trying to say....

ruby is more nice to the programmer. python has more corporate backing. django is a pain-in-the-ass compared to rails, pylons is better but still not the collection of power tools that is rails. i feel the python community is tail chasing the ruby community now-a-days. catching up will be hard as the python language misses the "principle of least supprise" that is a guiding principle for ruby. python (like c++) managed to supprise me after year of coding with it.

Interesting observation... I find that the culture of Rails developers is less to my taste than among Django developers. I can't explain it either, maybe it's personal preference for Django culture or maybe it's something more fundamental like Django devs are less insecure about their platform. I dunno either.

You're 9.5 weeks into a 10 week project. Some changes need to be made to a view cause a race condition was found in a load in the client application that talks to your framework.

If you're a rails guy, and you get the feature request, you go "What do I have to change to fix that" "Magic happend, it all works". You don't really have the ability always to twiddle the current output in some random way required to just get the comms working with the client and the system incrementally integrated with the world.

If you're the django guy, you go" Let me stick the output you want for now in the view, okay, does that work? cool I'll add some dynamic stuff, Okay cool, does it still work, I'll go do that the right way".

If you work in a position where you sometimes need to do the second one, but largely can behave like an adult and follow the correct ways to do the rest of the time, Django will be more rewarding to you than Rails, as you can get away with building that last mile out of earwax and sticky tack if you want to on Django, but on rails, you really have to used that same deliberate hand carved ivory you used everywhere else.

Which project is going to be purtier when you're done? Rails for sure! Which one is going to be easier to expand off of? Probably rails will take less time to get to the next version, as there will be no cleanup time to take out the sticky tack. Can you hack the crap out of something when you need to pop something out the door for the demo tommorrow? It really really varies upon what the hack is you need to pull. With Django it doesn't. That's the issue. That's what I mean about "willing to just get it done".

By willing to just get it done, I mean take the immediate pre-ship shortcuts and workarounds that you have to do often to ship on time. Rails abhors a shortcut or an abridgment. I think it has very large strengths for a lot of people. But for others, working in certain types of jobs, I find this insistance of "not going off the rails" infuriating.

Yes, I know if you're a ruby god whos' done rails for a very long time, and knows exactly how everything works, you CAN do this sort of thing. I've worked with some of you actually. I think you guys are cool. But the general ROR guy can't. The general Django guy can.

Django is a 18 wheeler truck and Rails a freight train. They do different things well. But damn, you crash if you take that train off the rails, but you can survive offroading in that truck for a bit to make that delivery at a weird stop.