What bothers me is that nowhere in that email, or nowhere on the site, I see a single reason for this move. Why? Why do it?
The only explanation I see is that developers wanted a nicer codebase. I've been on Pylons mailing list forever, and I can't recall a single practical issue or a feature request, which was decided to be hard/impossible to do due to architecture limitations. It just never comes up.
This is a classic case of redesign for the sake of redesign.
:-) I guess I'll have to copy&paste to support my argument. A link isn't good enough:
Due to the use of sub-classing, extensive, sometimes confusing, use of Stacked Object Proxy globals, and issues with configuration organization
As an active Pylons user I never, ever heard of these issues in Pylons circles. Translation: nobody asked for these improvements. Statements like "sometimes confusing" aren't doing it. When? Confusing for whom? I, for one, loved stacked globals. "from pylons import config" was great. Rails wasn't that simple. This is a big shock coming from nowhere. It just wasn't something that came up often on Pylons mailing list.
Let me make this clear: do I believe Pylons could be better? Yes I do. Do I think killing it to make it better was a good idea? No, I don't.
Anyway, I have tremendous respect for Ben and can't blame him for getting bored and wanting to work on something different.
EDIT: I just realized that you may be Ben. In that case thanks for building the greatest web framework for my favorite language! The fact that I'm passionate enough to bitch and moan about its death on the Internet should be the best testament to its greatness! :)
Many people loved "from pylons import config", until it didn't work, which frequently happened anytime someone wanted to use something from a Pylons app in a command line script (which seems to be pretty often). I do have a few minor clean-ups that help slightly with that stuff which I'll likely put out a Pylons 1.0.1 to address.
> Let me make this clear: do I believe Pylons could be better? Yes I do. Do I think killing it to make it better was a good idea? No, I don't.
So, the whole 'killing' thing seems slightly extreme. I've maintained Pylons with few changes besides bug fixes, security fixes, and deprecating old things for the past several years. And now the announcement that I don't plan on doing any more than the same thing for the pylons package code-base is "killing it off"?
If you're happy with pylons, there's no need to stop using it. The docs will always be available for it, the code-base will not be removed. By design, I just couldn't see how to continue it forward in ways that I (and a lot of people I've talked with) need.
Of course, a lot of people may not need anything more than pylons provides right now, and in that case I'd be hard pressed to tell them to switch their code to use pyramid. pylons is stable, mature, and has been maintained as such for quite awhile, there's a book that still pretty much applies to 1.0.
> Anyway, I have tremendous respect for Ben and can't blame him for getting bored and wanting to work on something different.
Thanks, sorry my nick doesn't reflect it, this is Ben. Seems I can't change my profile info on ycombinator, sigh. Or that 'feature' doesn't exist, anyways...
As I mentioned, the Pylons code-base was essentially frozen for any direction forward which I needed to build higher level tools. I know this may not be immediately obvious to everyone depending on your requirements, and pylons suits many peoples needs perfectly well.
I will be blogging about this in the future, at which point some of the key differences, and what they enable will hopefully become more clear. But Pylons is definitely not dead, and I think it won't be too long before people start to see what a larger development team can do. :)
This is the first post in the thread that makes me feel good about what's happened - perhaps this approach should have been the lead story, rather than what appeared to be "If you're using Pylons then say goodbye to all the cool developers - they've found something else new and shiny to work on".
( I've been watching this thread with keen interest - having chosen Pylons (vs Django, and RoR) about two months ago. )
The only explanation I see is that developers wanted a nicer codebase. I've been on Pylons mailing list forever, and I can't recall a single practical issue or a feature request, which was decided to be hard/impossible to do due to architecture limitations. It just never comes up.
This is a classic case of redesign for the sake of redesign.