A year ago I heard Guido say that he wasn't much interested in web frameworks, but apparently "after years of resistance" he's had a change of heart. Sounds like he's going through what every python programmer who wants to deliver web apps goes through. I like the fact that he want's web server independence. That is something that will benefit all python web programmers. (3 cheers for WSGI and Paste).
A few more of my thoughts reading this post and the responses:
- Google hasn't standardized on any python framework (though python is one of 3 official google languages)
- "Knowing myself, I'd happily go off and build my own web framework at this point". Is that the first thing that pops into any python programmers head whenever they run accross something? Hence the abundance of choices for web programming. I guess we can blame Guido for making it too easy to build stuff in python ;)
- Guido is pragmatic. He is looking at the competition, ie ROR.
- Guido is more pragmatic. He looks at more python choices before going off and writing his own.
- Guido is very pragmatic. He asks the community for their recommendations, realizing that many of these people have given this a lot more thought than he has.
- Lots of framework developers want Guido (or Google) to use their framework.
Note this is all good stuff. As someone who is also currently evaluating web programming frameworks, I find this very useful. I guess my pie in the sky dream is wsgi compliance. Then everyone can have their cake, and I can eat all of it. (Or at least if you wrote something for twisted, but I'm using cherrypy, or webpy or myghty or quixote, or zope or django or turbogears or ... or ... or ... I can still use your stuff too).
Note Guido actually commented on this
Why criticize Django for claiming to be the best? Nobody has denied it, and yet it's criticized as if it were somehow unethical. Frankly, the problem is that there are too many Python web frameworks and wannabees, and if we don't start some kind of shootout, however subjective, we'll never get to market dominance of a few good ones. I'm not saying Django is already the winner -- but we are looking for a winner (or, more likely, a small set of winners) so future developers looking for a Pythonic solution only have to compare a small number of options, all mature, feature-rich, well-supported etc., rather than having to sift through 80+ half-baked solutions.