Ryan Tomayko is a long-term Python guy in search of a web-development platform for his small tech company. His evaluation first went along the lines of safety vs freedom languages where he rejected the previous .NET course and chose to focus on the LAMP stack. Not too surprising for a Python guy, but his next choice was:

I knew that Rails had the Basically Good, Basically Complete Web Framework with a Huge Community – Python will have one too. But I lost it when I found that Ruby has a standard build tool in Rake, a standard documentation tool that meets my needs in RDoc, and that Gems were everywhere. I had assumed that these would be no further developed than their analogs in the Python world.

The long and short of it is that my evaluation turned into what looks to be a long term relationship. I’m committed to my responsibilities on the Python projects I have going right now and I have a ton of existing applications and utilities written in Python that aren’t going anywhere but Rails ganked 80% of my future code somehow.

Back in the day when I came over from PHP, I had many of the same reservations regarding tools and libraries. That surely, Ruby would have less and worse than the reigning web champion. Surprise, surprise: I didn’t. And the rest is history.