DRM - Daniel’s Random Mutterings

“Oh yeah? Well my framework’s dog is bigger than your framework’s dog. And anyway, your framework’s so fat, it has ‘Amtrak’ tattooed on its thighs…”

Guido van Rossum (of Python language fame, currently working for Google) has (seemingly unwittingly) triggered a whole slew of childish name-calling, posturing and general framework-bashing over at his blog.

It started with a seemingly innocent post asking about Web development frameworks in Python ( “Please Teach me Web Frameworks for Python!”). Guido’s looking into Web frameworks for some internal project at Google. The comments section to this post, as well as those of subsequent posts is interesting to study not only for the technical details that come through here and there, but also for the sociological phenomenon of hurt prides, people defending their favourite solution, misunderstandings, dragging up previous hurts and grievances (”well, yeah, but here’s an old blog entry where you wrote….”).

I’m learning a lot from the more technical comments. As I’ve pointed out previously, I’ve been looking at Python Web frameworks myself recently and have so far decided to go with Django, because I find that it offers what it does in the most aesthetically (to me) pleasing and also consistent way.

I guess it’s only to be expected that everyone likes to defend their favourite solution. Everybody knows he’s the expert on his preferred framework and flaunts his misconceptions about other frameworks in order to make his pet project appear superior. You really can’t let someone prove to you that you’ve made a bad choice, right? God knows I’ve done some of that myself in the past (btw - my ZX Spectrum definitely was way better than your Commodore C64).