Python Community
There's some things that have been sticking in the back of my head recently:
- How did Rails get so awesome?
- Why is the Ruby community so much cooler and friendlier than the Python community?
- Why has Python been unable to wrassle up a single good web framework? And, why are there 2384798217490827340981273409817230498172304917230981370937 Python web frameworks?
I think the problem is community leadership and hype!
The Python leaders are living in the past, where everything happened on mailing lists and newsgroups. That's not the way things operate these days! It's all about Blogs, and having some kind of unified place which scrapes up the most interesting developments of the day and conveys them to the masses in an easy to digest form -- Ruby has that in spades! RedHanded is one of the best ones. It spreads the news, it's fun to read, and it's full of hype! It motivates you to contribute to Ruby things!
Ruby just seems to have better websites. Look at RubyOnRails.com or Rubyforge.org. These people spend the time in crafting a useful set of services for the community.
Python's website, on the other hand is crap. It looks like crap, it feels like crap, it's total crap. It does have some cool things on it that could be quite useful, but it's so damn ugly and hard to use that I never go there. It's not organized well, you have to drill down through pages of links to get to useful things, it looks like the pages were created by coders, etc.
And I think this is all related to the fact that there are 2384798217490827340981273409817230498172304917230981370937 web frameworks for Python.
Python needs:
- More hype!
- More blogs, so the community's voice can be heard!
- More centralization!
Basically, we need a way to focus all of the community activity and collect it in one spot so we can see WHAT'S ACTIVE and WHO'S DOING WHAT!
Ian Bicking's blog entry entitled More Thoughts on RubyOnRails has some great comments on it, if you want more info about why Rails and Python web frameworks are so different. One of the most interesting comments was about the fact that most Python frameworks try to reuse existing components instead of creating a unified framework -- they're all mishmashes of glued together components. I believe that this stems from the whole lack-of-centralization problem in the Python community; people can't make a unified framework because they don't know what the community wants, and as a result, you end up with 389472938741092834709238479108327 frameworks that all address different issues, or you have frameworks which are sets of glued-together components.
It's kinda sad, cause I think Python is superior to Ruby in a lot of ways. It's just this simple social problem that's plaguing it!