Tim Bray is blogging about “inflection points” in the uptake of various technologies.
Python get’s a very positive review:
Today you’d be nuts not to look seriously at PHP, Python, and Ruby.
So, the rise of the so-called scripting languages is one of the inflection points, but it’s not the only one.
He singles out web-framework development as one place where there’s a lot of stuff happening, and a lot of new “rails-like” frameworks are cropping up all the time. TurboGears will live or die in the context of a much larger web-development revolution, and we need to be prepared to make our way forward in the midst of that.
What comes after rails will not be a rails clone. It will learn the right lessons from rails, avoid the pitfalls of rails, but it will also need to carve out something new and better than rails. For RDBMS users, I think the key difference between TG and Rails is the power and flexibility of SQLAlchemy. We need to “sell” this better.
There are a lot of other revolutions coming according to Tim. And I do think we’re looking at big changes in terms of everything from programming language choice, to web-development tools, to end-user desktops, and data persistence mechanisms. We’re also just beginning to see what the world of high-end javascript and other “rich” internet applications is going to do to our view of end-user software.
He doesn’t even mention the rise of EC2 and the Google App Engine as sea-changes in the way we buy computational resources, and I think that’s going to have a huge impact.
In the end my prediction is that the way we develop applications will change more in the next 5 years than it did in the last 5, and it’s time to start getting our heads wrapped around these issues, or we’ll be left behind.