Django, Rails, and PHP

Sam Newman has posted a useful high-level comparison of Django and Rails on his site. In it, I think he hits on one little-discussed reason why these two projects are grabbing so much mindshare right now:

[Rails and Django] … historically would have ended up being written in Perl or PHP - but ended up being written in Ruby and Python respectively.

When I heard DHH speak at OSCON, he mentioned switching to Ruby after giving up on trying to make PHP do the kind of stuff he wanted to do. Back in July I asked Simon Willison (of the Django team) about PHP; he said that both he and Adrian Holovaty had worked in PHP for years, but it was Python that “gave us the flexibility we needed to pull everything off.”

In other words, Rails and Django are web frameworks for people who are sick of PHP. That’s a big market.

sam newman commented on Sun Aug 21 17:36:59 2005:

Interestingly a large amount of people ‘switching’ to ruby and python because of rails and django are stillusing the new languages like hacky PHP apps. Movement to a new language/famework doesn’t neccessarily result in an improvement in software quality - in fact the reverse can often be the case!

Paul commented on Sat Aug 27 19:08:04 2005:

On the other hand, it’s likely that if those people stick around, the Python and/or Ruby communities and the emphasis they put on craft will have a positive influence on the newcomers. Worked for me. Python was the first language I got serious with after several years of PHP work, and the influence of the community was at least as significant for me as my prior experience in C, Pascal, Prolog, Forth, and whatnot.

miguev commented on Thu Apr 13 14:17:02 2006:

Haha, very big market. I’m looking for stop using PHP after several years of playing and developing with it.

I love Python, but Dreamhost is putting me on trubble with Django… so I am considering Rails (again). Maybe someday I’ll have the time to switch my PyQT apps to Rails.