Yet, I do all of my markup in Haml and SASS. Haml, I am far less enamored of than SASS… but SASS is just plain fuckin’ sex incarnate. You say you ENJOY writing CSS? I say, bullshit.

HTML, well… it’s quite verbose. Overly verbose. That just comes with the XML territory. But it’s nice, to be able to save half my time with Haml. I don’t always write in Haml, not when I’m just popping out a single page to describe something (elliottcable.name/contact.xhtml, rubydie.com) but I would never do an entire site by hand in HTML any more. Not when I can do it in Haml, require bits back and forth left and right in normal ruby, iterate repetitive sections, not worry about closing elements or wrapping structure… it’s made my life quite easier.

Rail on rails (hehe) all you want, but watch your footing with Haml and SASS. They are gods incarnate in this land of developers. Short them, and ware ye the six and a quarter hells I will bring precipitating down on your head.

Okay… so maybe not. But I seriously think you need to take a second look at them. You seem to have been ruined for the Ruby language by only seeing the Rails part of our community/code… you should jump into some of the OTHER Ruby frameworks, there’s a lot of ‘Good’ out there – more than more than more than enough to offset the Rails ‘Bad’. Check out Merb, Mack, Ramaze, and Sinatra for instance, they’re all very sexy – though Merb is the best of the bunch imho.

SASS represents a typical point where designers and programmers approach something differently. I’m constantly amazed when I see that well-known web designer’s style sheets have no structure at all (and still their designs are far better than anything I could come up with :-). The programmer in me makes me structure my CSS hierarchically (representing the DOM tree), and doing it manually was a major PITA with lots of repetition (and programmers hate repetition). SASS structures my CSS without making me repeat myself, and the end result is the same.

PHP code gives you a lot of freedom, but the results can be quite messy if it is written by an unstructured programmer. Rails got a lot of early hype with its MVC method and “build a blog in X minutes” videos. This attracted many PHP coders who were shocked and awe. Some of them have never recovered from the shock and continue spreading the “rails way”.

Combined with a few Web 2.0 companies, at the time when Web 2.0 was given a name, and that Rails was backed by a company, this attracted even more PHP coders and Java coders to the platform.

I have the impression that Python coders were generally experienced programmers and people with a varied experience. Since Rails attracted most of the bad PHP coders, the Python community was spared the “barbarian hordes”. Many of the new developments made by Pythonistas, really show a commitment to existing standards. When I read intelligent articles about standards, it is more likely to be followed by a Python code example, than Rails.

I’m not saying that ALL rails coders are bad. I see lots of great code and standards compliant web sites out there. But it has a much greater share of former spaghetti/self-taught/script kiddies who have “seen the light”.

HAML promotes very good habits when it comes to standards and it takes you away from having ugly views (both before and after rendering)

More generally, as a long-time Python user I was attracted to Django (having written a book about Python Web Programming) because it made a great decision about the split between computation and markup. I was amazed at how easy it was to build a relatively complex page structure automatically from the database and embed guaranteed-correct navigation structures into the basic template, which was then inherited by all page designs.

This didn’t happen by accident: the Ellington system was specifically designed to be useful to designers with no programming experience, and allows them to easily specify designs that programmers can easily populate: there’s just enough variability in the templating system for a designer to be able to wrap their head around it.