What's with the rants?

Some stars may have been aligned in a particularly nasty way on December 31, 2007, which might explain some rants that were published on various blogs. One of them at least has the quality of being humorous in a scatological sort of way: 'Rails is a Ghetto' by Zed Shaw, the creator of Mongrel -- although I'm fairly sure it doesn't seem humorous to the people he names in his post; and BTW, make sure there are no kids around when you read that post. I'd like to meet Zed one day, he's an interesting character who sure wears his heart on his sleeve.

I didn't find much humor though in James Bennett's rant against a blog post written by Noah Gift. I did find many gratuitous insults and uncalled for name-calling. As somebody said already -- chill, James! The comments on James's post are also revealing in their variety. Good thing the Python community also contains people like Ian Bicking who are trying to inject some civility and sanity into this.

For the record, I agree with Noah that documentation and marketing are two extremely important driving forces in the adoption of any framework. RoR's success is in no small part due to documentation, flashy screencasts and tireless marketing. And I also agree that Zope and its descendants would be so much better off with more marketing.