The technical talent behind left-wing political blog, Daily Kos, are looking for feedback on what platform they should use for the next revision of the site:
Daily Kos: DK4: Technology Cagematch Edition Language: Perl, Ruby, or Python? Java is right out, because I hate it and that much friggin' typing screws with my carpal tunnel issues. PHP is right out, because of security and other considerations. The only three languages seriously being considered are Perl, Ruby, and Python.
As it turns out, people have strong preferences towards Perl, Ruby, or Python. And I mean intense feelings about it. This is probably because all three languages suck, as do all their language predecessors, but each language has a different philosophy about where it's important to suck the least.
So which should we use? That ought to be a good flame war, right there, but there's something just as important, and that's the web framework itself...
It looks like things are heating up nicely on that thread, with
286 332 comments as of this writing. The .NET crowd felt left out of the options, so they're weighing in, along with the GUI folks who have plenty of gripes.
Daily Kos is the most trafficked blog on the web with well over a million monthly readers and thousands of writers. Content deemed "front page" worthy is promoted by a team of editors led by site founder,
Markos Moulitsas Zúniga.
How much of Daily Kos' success comes from the passion and quality of the writing vs. the technology powering the site? From the average reader and contributor's perspective, it's all about the writing, but none of it would be read if it wasn't for the quality of the engineering capturing the content and reliably serving it to readers. Ideally, they'll be able to debate, decide, develop, then start the whole cycle over again without much user interruption.
