> In Ruby it's Time.now, come on people.
YMMV, but I don't find it terribly burdensome to import datetime and call datetime.now().
Because is it datetime.datetime.now? or date_time.date_time.now? or datetime.Datetime.now? Or datetime.DateTime.now? Or DateTime.now? or dt.datetime.now?
Because it could be any of those. Some people import datetime like numpy (import numpy as np) so they can call timedelta like dt.timedelta and this is fine and everything, but the combination of no standard in python for how to do this, plus the hard to remember interfaces, plus the multiple libraries that try to do the same thing and the different way they differ in capitalization, etc. Means there is just way too much to remember off the top of your head.
In ruby it's Time.now and I never forget it and I never have to import it and that is honestly awesome. If I open a shell anywhere in any project for any version of Ruby I've used the current time is just eight chars away, and even though I love Python, that has never been the case on any Python project I've worked on and I've worked on more than a few.
If I were to write a web app, my first instinct would be to go back to Rails. However, I do agree with you that much as I like Ruby and Rails, Python would be my overwhelming choice for analytical or numerical code - and I do like Python.
One possibility would be to handle as much CRUD and UI development in rails as possible, and make analytical code available to the app through services in Python.
I know it sucks, because Rails is better than Django, but at the end of the day I love Ruby but my day job is Python. Also, even though I can never remember capitalization, underscores , pluralization, interfaces in Python[0] at least I don't have to think when I type `and` and at least strings aren't mutable by default and when I need the data science it's right there waiting for me.
[0] lol "".startwith, "".starts_with, start_with(""), etc. In Ruby it's Time.now, come on people.