I've been using Django for the last three years and no, it's not Rails. It's a very light framework and you're almost on your own for many decisions. More like a router, a test framework, an ORM and templating language put together than a cohesive framework. Easy to end up with something totally different in every project you look at. On the other side all Rails projects look alike, which is much better when taking over from previous developers.

By the way, Django's inflexible templating language kills productivity (templatetags, as with Java 15 years ago) and the ORM is (how to say it kindly?) lacking in elegance. Django's Model.objects.get(pk=1) vs Rail's Model.find(1) is the least of the problems but I'm short on time now. Because (sarcasm on) we might get confused if we omit objects, what could Model.get possibly mean? (sarcasm off)

Everything in Python seems over engineered as if only very large projects are going to use it, and Django makes no exception. Still, I'll take Python and Django all the times over Java and any of its web frameworks. My personal rankings are:

Ruby/Rails > Elixir/Phoenix > Python/Django >>>> Java/* > JavaScript/* which doesn't have any serious server side framework. I have little direct PHP experience but I'd put it between Python and Java (I managed the developers on medium sized Zend project years ago.)

As somebody who was a Rubyist for about a decade but has worked at a Django shop for several years now, I definitely see how they're similar, but I don't think Django is clearly the better of the two. Django is simultaneously less helpful (you have to do more things explicitly, such as specifying routes) and less flexible (for one example, Django doesn't have a public query builder and doesn't have a replaceable ORM — you're basically stuck with either the built-in ORM methods or SQL strings).

For me personally, Rails is the best web framework I've seen — but in an age when static typing and other static guarantees are increasingly popular, Ruby as a language is not what people want. It's an artifact of the old Lisp and Smalltalk school of thought.

Where is the evidence, outside Hacker News, for this increasing popularity of static typing? The fastest growing languages by most metrics are currently Javascript and Python, both of which are dynamically typed.

According to GitHub's 2018 stats, the two fastest-growing programming languages last year were Kotlin and TypeScript. GitHub explicitly pointed out that "type safety" appears to be one of the biggest factors influencing language popularity in 2018. And even Python, the fastest-rising dynamically typed language, has been adding new static typing features in every release for the past three years. The last new Python app I wrote was fully type-annotated and typechecked, and the new data classes feature actually requires type annotations.

python has mypy types and most places are switching to typescript over javascript. If you work with more than a handful of developers (and as such on a project large enough to require them) not having types DRASTICALLY decreases productivity.

Do you have anything to back-up you claim about "most places"? Most of the job ads on Indeed.com/.co.uk for Python and Javascript make no mention of Typescript or mypy.

Django has a lot going for it in terms of simplicity but it lacks most of Rails' advanced features and timesavers. In my experience it sits somewhere between Sinatra and Rails

Also, having to deal with Python packaging is a world of hurt. No thanks. There's about 16 ways to package and distribute Python, and they all are half-complete and a royal pain to deal with. Ruby's packaging isn't perfect, but it's a thousand times better than any of the Python packaging solutions out there.

Package management is a hard problem, but we know that good and adequate package managers do exist. I'm not sure why more effort hasn't been expended by the Python community, particularly since it's often the first thing a new user will encounter when picking up a language for the first time.

I use Pipenv currently, but only because it's the best of a bad lot and would jump in a heartbeat if a serious competitor came along. It has its own set of problems (slow, young and idiosyncratic) but offers me at least two things its predecessor didn't: separation of production/dev dependencies and seamless integration with different versions of Python, both of which have been available in Ruby since I started programming in it.

This is a perfect exemplifies my experience with both languages: I have found while Python might be better at a lot of things, the user experience is invariably superior with Ruby efforts and I wish the Python community would put more effort into this area.