Rails and Django comparison whitepaper

Decent attempt at comparing them, but there are some spots they clearly don't know enough about the frameworks to provide a valid rating.

Basically they are saying both are good, which is true.

Being a thoughtful, rational type, I'll suspend judgment until I've read the whitepaper. Then I'll vote on the article based on whether the conclusion supports my preexisting biases... ;-)

Haven't read the whole thing over, but they make no mention of performance comparisons in the conclusion. How could you miss that!

Let me get this straight. So you would choose the framework with slightly better plugin support and larger community even if it meant it was three times slower and consumed twice as much memory? If you have deep pockets and have no adversion to unnecessarily managing huge server farms, then go ahead.

I've presided over two rails websites in the past and topping out at around 15req/s on average was not fun. Rewriting to Django and getting 45req/s and less memory usage was definitely worth it. (I'd rate my development experience in other areas to be about equal)

The article is correct. In this interview (http://twit.tv/floss11) Guido states that Python has been OO from the outset (1990).

The thing you have to understand is Ruby and Python do OO differently. To Python everything is a hash table. This isn't the case for Ruby and their differences mainly stem from that. It adds interesting elements like functions are very simple to pass around in Python because they are not bound to a class. It is still OO, just a different way of doing it.

Guido has also repeated for years that passing around self isn't a technical necessity. He prefers it as part of Python's "explicit is better than implicit policy. What you have to understand is that a method call boils down to method(receiver, args...). Python just makes that explicit.

Another quote from Guido:

"Get rid of self: I think this has been addressed in the responses; it's not as easy as you'd think, and there are important advantages to the uniform interpretation of methods as "just functions that get called in a funky way". In Ruby, everything is a method, or an anonymous block, and there are no "free functions". Python uses the complimentary approach, treating functions as first-class citizens. Both approaches are complete; they are however incompatible, and you can't easily morph one into the other. (Personally, I find that the criticm of explicit self has about as much merit as the criticism of Python's use of whitespace.)" (http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=214325)

I too think it is kind of a silly argument. Passing around self has never been a problem for me. 4 more letters for each method. Not a problem, imo, in exchange for first-class functions. And super() in Python works fairly similar to super in Ruby AFAIK.

For the record, Common Lisp users probably find both Python and Ruby's OO limited and clunky. Just got to keep in mind there's different ways of approaching it.