It almost feels like we are being denied access to sex-themed humour...
Newsflash... we might not find forking or dongle jokes funny... does not mean that we do not enjoy jokes... it means we enjoy things that are actually funny....
How dare those people who came to our country in the hope of sanctuary from persecution, have the audacity, that when the justice system fails them, to turn to other means, such as raising awareness of their plight....
Honestly its as though they were expecting a fair and just society that was meant to represent a paragon of human rights and justice...
I guess they don't know about pandering tories who try to placate the casual and everyday racist attitudes found among their base. I guess the stories they told themselves of British hope and justice missed out the part where their lives would be pawns in a political fight.
Its a keyword, but its not needed (as its not needed in many modern languages) but many rubyists I've worked with said that it was a nice feature that the return keyword was unnecessary and did not use it.
The best book I've found for picking up rails was the latest edition of the Agile Web Development book, which I actually own 3 different editions of it, for differing versions of rails.
The lack of a Django book, probably has more to do with the fact of the community being more focused on tutorials and Blogs rather than cashing in, although there are a few django books out there. That said with the documentation and tutorials out there I've never felt a great need for a missing book.
The simplicity and plugability of django's authentication system gives you as much as you need and as much as you want, if it doesn't provide something then you can reuse it. I can't think why I'd want to "choose" between different systems that should be provided in the core functionality.
The admin is not the auth system, you are not forced to use it and in fact its disabled by default in every single django startup app. I've in the past done my own functionality pages, and would use Admin when it was most suitable.
Personally I haven't seen anything in Rails 3.0 that makes me think "ooh this is a killer feature" the only thing that rails had over Django was migrations, and South closed that hole up years ago.
I'm going to to reinvestigate Rails 3 soon, however my concerns with magic are related as much to the coding style as the overal magical structure. One of the reasons I understand Django so well is the well written code, the other being that it is clean and well designed as a system.
As someone who's been using Django since the magic removal branch, its documentation is top notch, not to mention the lack of magic makes it very usable, supportable, and build-able on. I can say definitely what's going on from the top layer to the bottom layer without any black box behaviour.
Rails is full of sloppy coding, lots of magic, coders who think that return is an keyword, and bad practices. I have no problem with ruby as a language, even if it takes flexibility a step too far, however the style of coders, and the general "I did something clever and unreadable so I'm awesome" attitude seems to permeate the ruby-verse. Also while many improvements have been made on the ruby interpreters... the performance is STILL lagging behind Python, which as a dynamic language with compiled backend elements, gives languages like Java a run for their money.
Both systems are very powerful, Django has certain batteries included that I find it strange that rails fails to do (namely a plugabble extensible flexible user authentication system) and both have their adherents.
The writer of this original piece is clearly not very up on Django development, the strong community apparently how to write well implemented MVC code. Having spent years working with a variety of frameworks, I've yet to find a place where Django stops you doing what you want (unless its a fundamentally stupid idea).
Newsflash... we might not find forking or dongle jokes funny... does not mean that we do not enjoy jokes... it means we enjoy things that are actually funny....