For what it’s worth, I agree whole-heartedly with Antonio’s post. Monitoring the Django community, we see so many people who come to, and love Django via the Ruby on Rails path. A lot of people are drawn into the RoR hype and for whatever reason they find that their skills, minds, or work patterns just don’t mesh up with how it works. Those people typically find their way to Django and some have even become valuable members of the community.
Rails is the best thing that ever happened to Python
Don’t let this confuse you though. Python (and Django) are able to benefit from all the interest geared towards dynamic languages, only because they are technically excellent and make a strong case on their own. Their communities are much less about marketing and more about substance, in my opinion. I understand those who go from Ruby to Python, but there are far fewer motivations in favor of a switch from Python to Ruby.
The reason for this is that, in a way, Python is currently an answer to Ruby’s MRI shortcomings. When I speak about Ruby’s shortcomings I always refer to the implementation and not to the design of the language, which is a well balanced and coherent mix of paradigms and features.
