Why PyGuys? (or Why we’re not on the Rails bandwagon)
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008We recently announced the re-branding of our consulting practice as PyGuys.com. By marketing on a brand-by-brand basis rather than at the company level, we think that we’ll be able to improve the signal-to-noise ratio for the targeted audiences of our various products and services. For example, our Python consulting customers may not have a need for our project management software, and vice-versa.
That being said, the casual observer may wonder why we’re so gung-ho over Python when it appears that all of the cool kids are using Ruby on Rails. When we started the company in 2005, there was still plenty of room on the Rails bandwagon. Our adoption of Python was deliberate based upon the maturity of its language, libraries, and community.
Quite simply, we’re in this for the long haul, and feel that Python has the best prospects of being the dominant dynamic language in mainstream IT settings over the next 36 months. Methinks that the initial hype surrounding Rails has already started to subside, and Rails will continue as a good way of building standard web applications, especially for solo developers and small teams.
It just won’t end up being the way to build web applications.
Don’t get me wrong, the Rails folks have done a lot to validate the use of dynamic languages in mainstream settings, and the Ruby language itself has a bunch of cool and features. You will find no negativity here. But I think that Rails’ great and durable contribution to the field of software engineering is not its libraries and syntax, but rather its philosophy of “Convention over Configuration”. That philosophy transcends technology stacks, and has already found its way into a slew of web application frameworks on a number of platforms.
But when the technology rubber meets the Enterprise IT road, I believe that Python (and its community/ecosystem) is a better and more accessible choice than Ruby for most companies looking to adopt a new application development platform, current conference attendance statistics nonwithstanding.
With PyGuys.com, we’re formalizing our Python advocacy in the branding of our consulting services. In hindsight, we should have done this 3 years ago. So to paraphrase Barbara Mandrell (and there aren’t too many times in life when one gets to say that), we were Python when Python wasn’t cool. (Note: link contains audio)
