Hello all, short-term lurker, first-time poster.

Python went through this discussion about a year ago (and probably many
times before and since), and it can get ugly. The "branding/marketing"
supporters vs. "technical merits/docs/has to be perfect in Lynx"
supporters situation can get very contentious. That said, you people
seem a bit more friendly than c.l.py so maybe that won't happen <g> (to
be fair there were plenty of very nice people too..). The "too many web
frameworks?" also came up, though due to userbase size and visibility
of Rails it seems less of an issue in Ruby.

Also, I'd suggest splitting off design/appearance/etc concerns from
DNS/etc. if possible. There is/was a python-marketing list that was
discussing the whole thing too, to keep traffic off of the main list.
Maybe that would help here, I don't know.

Anyhow, here's a bit I posted then that I think is relevant here:

=================

So, regarding uh, *python*, I'm thinking perhaps a more useful
direction and way to corral this tangent is putting together a short
list of general (potential) user types - complete newcomers, dabblers
in perl/php, experienced devs, etc.

Related to this, and a key part of the site design/layout Ive lacked
time to do so far is a good overview of industries/fields using
python. My first thought is a (much shorter) Yahoo!-esque directory,
titled

"Using Python For..."

Web Programming                Education
(CGI, App Servers, etc)       (Teaching programming,class texts,&c)

Scientific                             Graphical Interfaces (GUI)
(genome, biochem, &c)      (wx, tk, etc.)

Networking                         Statistical/Financial
(servers, sockets, etc)      (numeric, financial libs, etc)

and so on. Granted this type of list could be sliced and diced many
ways, but overall I think is a really good way to pull people
in. Perl.com has a list like this though, it's now(?) alphabetical and
a bit difficult to use I think.

Also (vaguely) relating to the above discussion, if you're working
for a financial firm and need info on finance libs and apps, being
able to eliminate the 8 zillion other things python does well and go
straight to your need, you are in a way eliminating that other
noise/distraction/confusion and simplifying the decision/edification
of the viewer.

=================

This idea seemed to get a decent reception from both "sides", so maybe
it would be useful for Ruby as well.

-T