I think it would have been too hard to stay Python up and down the stack like Ruby on Rails does.

I don’t need to know Smarty or Cheetah.

So, I’ll stick with the syntax superiority to python argument.

Thanks for the comment.

I think you’re right though, Ruby’s just more fashionable now. They’re both excellent languages, but I always secretly wish for Python’s whitespace blocks in Ruby instead of a cascade of ‘end’s at the bottom of the file. I’d like to believe that Ruby’s flexibility at creating DSLs is somehow related to its success, but I just don’t believe it. Not enough programmers seem to care. Even PHP, which is a dandy templating language, has morons busy making things like Smarty. Bizarre. If DHH had picked Python instead of Ruby, then Ruby would be playing catch-up now instead of Python. Zope also was a big factor in holding back Python’s emergence on the web.

I think any reasonably flexible language can make a fine web development solution, if the right person makes the right framework for it. The problem is, Ruby + Rails is the first really excellent web development framework.