That’s a very good question!

We have used functional programming languages before for web development (SISC Scheme for NMK, Eralng for TonyG’s jukebox) and I would have loved to use a functional language to do development for other sites too (LISP / Scheme especially seem like excellent languages for web stuff). A few things to keep in mind, though:

1. Python is, to some extent, a functional language. It isn’t pure, and anonymous functions are too weak to my taste, but if you like the functional paradigm Python allows you to follow this path. I find that most of my Python code, especially for the web, is mostly functional.

2. There’s more to a programming language than just the language itself. When developing applications you often need to rely on existing code and tradition. Python has a fantastic community and a huge collection of libraries, which no other (dynamic) language can compete with right now - certainly none of the purely functional languages available. If we were to choose a different, functional language, it is likely that any gain we’d make in productivity would be offset by losses due to having to write a lot of code from scratch that for Python is readily available in the form of libraries, frameworks, free software and documentation.

So, Python was a great choice for a few web applications we’ve built, and I’m definitely going to continue with it as my primary choice for now, but I’d definitely watch the functional arena closely - the way things are developing I wouldn’t be surprised if we’ll have an adequate competitor soon (Haskell? Erlang? R6RS? Arc?)

As I heard LShift advocates usage of Erlang, the framework worth to consider could be Erlyweb. It is MVC component based framework with some RoR-like magic, build on top of Yaws. Yaws supports dozen or even hundreds of thousands of concurrent connections and it benefits of Erlang’s features.

Are you suggesting that there is no way in which one programming language can be better than another?!

It is perfectly legitimate to prefer Python over Ruby but it is something else to say one is better than the other …

Anyway both seems kind of closed. It is the little “the shortcoming of the framework and the language” that bothers me the most. Mixing in the same sentence two completely different ’shortcomings’ is not a good idea; at least when you give some respect to programmer languages in general.

Update by Paul Crowley: this comment isn’t blogspam - it links to an article entitled “Python web development and frameworks in 2007″.

James Bennett,
sometimes people needs “lesser” framework than “bigger” framework - esp when making very specific app

It’s small and simple enough, too, that you can read its code when you need to figure out how something works.