[atdt]

The web stack in Python got dramatically better in the past two years: just take a look at Flask, Werkzeug, requests, class-based views in Django, etc.

There were major improvements in deployment, too: Fabric and supervisord are maturing very nicely.

Once you've nailed the CRUD part of your startup down and want to start slicing your data in interesting ways, you have extremely powerful and easy-to-use libraries like nltk and numpy at your disposal.

Finally, Python continues to get a tremendous boost from the fact that Google uses it to write sample client code for their APIs.

[mhd]

Better than before or better than Ruby?

I think you struck a valid point, though. There are lots of options for relatively small Python-esque web stacks, and considering that the architecture style seems to go that way – with lots of independent services and big JavaScript frontends – you're often quite well-served with Python.

But maybe that's just my somewhat biased perception, I wonder how the general trend of Python vs. Ruby fares in comparison to the trend of Django vs. Rails.

And speaking of bias: Once you get small services, interop features and libraries become quite important to save you work, and I have the feeling that quite often generic Ruby gems could use some work. Often there's a plethora of half-abandoned solutions for one task, all somewhat orphaned on Github.

Then again, both languages still don't come close to CPAN in that regard (then again, what does?).

[atdt]

Oh, I should've been clearer: I meant that things got a lot better than before. I don't know Ruby all that well so I have no basis for making comparisons.

[oneilse14]

+1 for Flask. I recently replaced a huge, bloated SOAP code base with around 200 lines of Python with Flask. I don't know if there is an equivalent with Ruby, but Flask is a pleasure to work with.