Are you one of the multitudes of people that want to know once and for all who is the king of web application frameworks in the Python/Ruby arena? You might want to attend a yet to be announced Ruby vs. Python Webframework Charity Deathmatch here in muggy Atlanta, GA. These are some ideas of how we might organize it, if you have some advice or ideas, please let me know as we are just now brainstorming how the event would shake down.
I don’t think we would limit attendance to just Atlanta, GA programmers either. I believe anyone that wanted to attend and enter the competition would be allowed.
Mission: Sort out once and for all who is the king of all web frameworks…for Charity.
Rules:
1. We find a needy charity, and they give a judge the design spec.
2. Teams of Ruby and Python programmers are given the spec on Friday and have until Saturday morning to come up with a prototype. Saturday morning each Ruby and Python teams internally vote on the best design.
3. One group from Ruby and one group from Python code then code until Sunday morning when judging starts.
4. Winner gets to be the design for the Charity, and the loser..well maybe they get VC startup money?
The initial interest has been strong so far, and there will be both technical and business people who will attend
Lets face it Ruby and Python are both great languages and fun to code in. I think the more of these type of events we have the better. It might be cool to have a future event where groups have to design an application in both Ruby and Python and you get judged on both efforts collectively.
Comments or Suggestions?
A small addition:
5. Post the code.
6. Post the tests (if any).
7. Give the teams a chance to explain their entry - winning or not.
I don't think it will be definitive, but it should lead to some contructive debate.
- Paddy.
The main problem with this match is, that the best Python guys will not participate in such game while *best* of ruby are just the typical show-off fellows. There is no doubt Python is better than Ruby at in aspect you will pick.
I don't think you will find the "king of all web frameworks" where you are looking - neither Python or Ruby communities managed to put forward enough people to take part in Plat_Forms [1] 2007, PHP, Java and Perl all managed to provide 3 teams and a variety of frameworks without any use or mention of Rails or Django.
How about you email some local Perl Monger groups to see if they want to take part? I'm fairly confident that there would be Catalyst[2] team interested if you mentioned it to them, although it's pretty short notice.
1] http://www.plat-forms.org/
2] http://catalyst.perl.org/
Paddy: I think these are good suggestions!
Vito: We are also trying to be good natured about the whole event, so I think it is less about who is better, than having a fun time.
Aaron: Your absolutely correct. I just don't know any of the Perl people well in Atlanta. That would be an even better competition. There is no rush on the date as a few of us thought this up last night. We are just getting ideas on how to have some fun cross-language culture exchange. I suppose we would want to stick with dynamic languages, but adding PHP sounds fun as well.
umm,
Skew the whole thing!
Invite several charities with web-app needs and get the programmers to implement any of the charities needs. that way many more (registered), charities get their work done and the winner is the team that drinks the most beer!
- Paddy.
Python via Plone is already powering many profit, government and non-profit web sites.
http://plone.net/sites
Chris,
That is a good point. We are switching to Plone for PyAtl, because it will basically run itself. On the other hand there may be something domain specific to a Charity or group of Charities that we could target so that we don't reinvent the wheel. Maybe an e-commerce site? This is just random bantering at this point. We are also thinking about getting a couple of corporate sponsors for the event.
I have played pick-up basketball since I was about 5 years old, and have played in a quite a few tournaments. It would be fun to have more of these "tournaments" for programmers.
Why not include Perl, too? It recently won in a similar competition against PHP and Java.
scorpio,
I agree. The more dynamic languages the better. Who wants to help plan this? It takes a lot of work.
fact or film