danieldon

Indeed. Sass and Compass have been doing this for years. Using mixins for CSS framework rules so markup stays semantic is basically the core concept behind Compass.

That's certainly one leading theory, and probably the most likely. However, that happened earlier in the summer, a month or more before he actually shut everything down. There are other possible theories, eg, in his last tweets he lamented about feeling left behind by the progress of open source, or the theory that he planned it all along based on the Poignant Guide's ending.

No matter which of those reasons it was, it's pretty baseless to claim that he took down all of his websites, comics and open source software in a variety of languages including one he created due to some mysterious, unmentioned, irreconcilable beef the Ruby community, especially considering he was one of the most influentual people in defining that community.

    if I remember correctly

You don't. _why left open source for unknown reasons.

    89033 modules

Only 21694 distributions, though. The analogue in Ruby is a gem and RubyGems already has 19502.

That would conflict with "Apple doesn't have to spend their time discussing with you about legal dispute among copyright holders."

I look forward to your campaign to change

    hg init project

to

    mercurial-admin.py startrepository project

Those Ruby developers and their magic. Or something.

I haven't, but I know it works fine. Heroku is more of a Rack host than a Rails host, so any Rack-based framework (AFAIK, all Ruby frameworks at this point) run seamlessly on it.

    What happens when you do a django template "your way" 
    or "they way we can do it in 2 hours instead of 12"?

I've worked on a lot of projects and can't imagine the situation where you'd have this kind of a variation in time to create two remotely similar versions of a template. If you are talking about a fully designed template + CSS + JS, then you could possibly get up to 12 hours, but there would be no way to shorten that to 2 hours without doing something completely different.

    This is a comment about the non-web components of the 
    language.

And this entire discussion is about web development. The OP, who already knows multiple non-web-centric languages, asked specifically about web frameworks.

    The Django community is perhaps more opinionated. The 
    actual software isn't.

Depends on what you mean by the software. The framework overall is very opinionated, even if you can use parts of it in a modular way.

    The actual software has strong opinions (aka, 
    intentional inflexibility)

Let me take the opportunity to give you a heads up that Rails 3 has been out for months now and is widely used in production. One of the most significant design goals of Rails 3 was intentional flexibility.

Have you looked at Padrino? I recently experimented with it and was surprised that it was an extremely awesome middle ground, to the point where I'll probably use it for my next project. It's very fast, close to Rack and easy to use with Rack middleware, has Rails-style view helpers, has sinatra-style controllers, very simple and elegant mountable apps, a focus on DB agnosticism, among many other things

I don't presume to know your work environment, but personally I work on my own projects and do contract work and, in my experience, taking on debt is usually a sign that there's a problem with the requirements and estimates, so I usually change those before making the code less maintainable (which, IMO, is usually a case of treating the symptom).

Regardless, I'm weary of claims that controller-level (django view level) code is a major pain point in Rails. In some ways it's actually easier since you can make fewer decisions by making them resource centric, but even deviating from that is as simple as map "/path", :to => "controller#action".

Rails/Django controllers/view and routing/urls aren't as elegant as micro-frameworks like Flask and Sinatra or not-so-micro-frameworks like Padrino, but they aren't anything close to serious stumbling blocks (though maybe routing to a very small degree in resource-centric Rails 2). Every blocking issue I've had with either framework has been on a deeper level. In Rails pre-3, it was usually configuration-related when trying to do something too unconventional. In Django, it's when trying to deviate from the overall Django philosophy and use something other than the included batteries.

    Python will be more useful if you decide to do
    something with the language other than ruby on rails

If by "ruby on rails" you mean "anything to do with web development, deployment and server config management," then you'd have a point. Of course, when the context is a discussion about web development, then whether you can easly write OpenGL apps is irrelevant. Good developers also don't just learn one language and try to use it for everything.

    with it as well (SPSS, SciPy, NumPy and various other
    things)

That has effectively nothing to do with which web framework to work with. The OP has already worked with Java, C# and Objective-C. Assuming he comes across a project that requires something like SciPy or NumPy and assuming he doesn't use something from one of the languages he already knows, I'm guessing that he, like most hackers, wouldn't have a problem learning Python or another language no matter what web framework or language he had been using recently for web development.