The Netreaper thinks I should drum up some support for Nordwalde so they can get a new WM screen to watch football. Okay, I'm not really sure why I should do that to the people of Nordwalde, but okay - I don't live there anymore.
What really excites me, however, is the great voting function, which asks for a Captcha before voting. Which only contains uppercase letters and numbers. Which are hard to distinguish because a particularly stupid font was chosen. And the kicker: you're not supposed to use capital letters. Is this a Captcha with a built-in intelligence test?
Well, never mind, if you want to drive the Nordwalde people crazy, just vote for the screen there, so hordes of crazy football fans can stand around and watch football. Best during the final, and best if Germany is out early and no one knows what to do there anymore.
Guido van Rossum asks about web frameworks - nothing exciting in itself. He just hasn't done anything with them before and wants to inform himself. He makes some claims that aren't quite accurate (e.g., that Django's template language is similar to PHP), but given the likely brevity of his "looking into" it, it's forgivable.
It gets funny in the comments on his post. Mountains of frameworks, all of which aren't finished. Piles of comments like "take XYZ, it's great and in the next few months it will definitely be usable" - especially often TurboGears is suggested.
Sorry, what? If I'm looking for a web framework, I don't want one that will be usable in a few months. I want one that is usable now and for which there are clear statements about its fitness right now. We really don't need any more web frameworks that won't be finished.
I don't have anything against a variety of frameworks - it makes life exciting and interesting because you never know if you've bet on the right framework - but there are certainly more than enough unfinished frameworks that are pitched by their users as if they were the best thing since sliced bread.
By the way, I use Django for exactly these reasons: the stuff has been in use for quite some time and has proven that it is suitable for large sites and high loads. It was developed from real applications and is not the byproduct of some unimportant Web2.0 thing of which I have never heard outside the TurboGears clique. It was also not cobbled together by a kid alone who thinks he's the new Einstein and believes he's the only one who knows how frameworks should be. And it's not a project that has been dead in principle for over a year because the author has long since moved on to something else. And it's only called 0.9 at the moment because API changes and cleanup work are pending in the guts (which would be appropriate for any project that has been developed for two years in live operation) - not because it's only 90% finished.
Of course, after this Artima post, everyone will look at GvR and wait to see what he chooses. And of course, all the web framework authors will jump up and down and want to make themselves noticed. And of course, every word will be analyzed and rubbed in the other's face. And a whole series of projects will make short-term quick-fix changes because they hope GvR will choose their framework. All of which is a really insane waste of time. Sometimes these kids in the OSS projects really get on my nerves.