Lonely Lion

Quite a well thought out rant about why Django, not Pylons. Although I agree with most of his points, I get frustrated with these posts as they end up pulling a lot of nutbags from the nutbag store, who usually act like big nutbags in the comments.

Competition and opinions are good. Comment-baiting perfectly valid projects (just because I like Django’s oomph more than Pylon’s doesn’t mean that Pylons is bad (far from it), it’s just not for me) is a fast track to not-dating-ville.

I’d like to put forward the following bit of Franklin-like common sense wisdom, “no one ever got laid by arguing about web frameworks.” Thanks Adam for putting on paper why a lot of us prefer Django to PylonTurboZopeGears, but screw you dummy blog trolls that really believe there’s some sort of conflict worth taking sides on.

Save your energy for things that matter, like football.

I’ve been pleasantly watching the releases of Apollo and Silverlight over the past few days, and just sort of thinking, “oh, nice, new things to play around with.” Then comes Mark Pilgrim with a dose of cranky, yet wildly accurate ranting.

Meanwhile, I’m really enjoying my new found need of Javascript. I’m doing lots of neat AJAX’y things, the sorts of stuff that everyone else was doing months ago, so I’m sort of primed for the argument of, “don’t buy into these corporate re-do’s of the web, stick with the open web…stick…with…the…open…web.”

Sounds good to me, I guess. Yet, at the same time, everytime M$ & Company say the words Ruby or Python, it gets that much easier to say the same words in front of a somewhat backwards potential tech customer and not get booted out the door. So, the tally so far: big companies reinventing the web –, big companies putting good words in press releases ++.

As an aside, please never trim your fingernails at your desk during work hours within earshot of me. It’s really goddamn gross.

Hey Lazyweb, is there some clever pattern that addresses passing an ‘order by’ to a database and getting an alphabetically sorted list where “the” doesn’t factor into the sort?

Look at this gigantic list of bands. It’s annoying to have to remember that “The” screws everything up.

Do I create a field “name_without_the” and select * from bands order by name_without_the? I’m assuming this is a common alpha-issue that’s been solved millions of times, but I can’t find a best-practice suggestion via two minutes of Googling.

Please suggest clever ways to do this without sorting in-memory or some junk like that. Let’s keep it in the database folks.

Could someone please decide on one syntax for wiki markup? Please? I’m tired of learning how to write a f’ing pre tag.