A talk given at PyCon Argentina and PyCon Brazil, 2009.

Web development sucks.

It’s true: web development, at its worst, is difficult, repetitive, and boring. The tools we have suck. At best, they make web development slightly less painful, but we’re a long way from making web development awesome.

The history of web development tools is a history of trying to solve this problem. It’s a history of asking, “how can we make this suck less?” It’s important to understand this history, because we can look at past trends and use them to predict the future.

In the world of grammarians there are two competing camps: descriptivists and prescriptivists. Edward Finegan of the University of Southern California sums up the difference:

Descriptive grammarians ask the question, “What is English (or another language) like – what are its forms and how do they function in various situations?” By contrast, prescriptive grammarians ask “What should English be like – what forms should people use and what functions should they serve?”

In the prescriptivist camp falls Lynne Truss, The “blog” of “unnecessary” quotation marks, and your high school English teacher. Prescriptivists aim to help us use the English language properly. The intention is noble: if we all speak the same language, we can communicate much more effectively. But it’s a bit Quixotic: if language was static, we’d all still write like Chaucer.

I’ll have more notes about CouchDB later tonight.

First, though, I want to step back and look at the big picture.

A few months ago, Bill de hÓra wrote that “a framework like Django or Rails is purpose-built for the Web” (as opposed to old-school tools that try to pretend the Web doesn’t exist – I’m looking at you, ASP). It doesn’t sound like much, but to me this is the best possible compliment Django could be given. We’ve tried incredibly hard to make sure that Django respects and follows the general principles of the Web.