> Python took a relatively long time to put out a comparable product. I don't remember if Django existed, but there certainly wasn't the situation you have today where Django is basically the "Python Rails" and they're seen as being on roughly equal footing. Instead, Pythonistas were all talking about how you should take Twisted and twelve other libraries and you just write all this glue code and then it's sort of like Rails if you squint really hard — and nobody really found that exciting either.
This is the most informative part of your comment. I came to Python around version 2.6, and Django was already pretty near its modern form. I also first started hearing about Rails at that time, so my perception was "Python has always had Django, and Rails is a new thing." If Rails is older than Django, that explains much.
> Python invariably loves explicitness
Before I used Python, Java and C were my main languages. I was amazed at how short programs became in Python. For this reason, saying "Python loves explicitness" strikes me as strange, since it gets rid of braces, semicolons, variable declarations, the 'new' operator...
> A lot of other people hate that kind of code, and they will be much happier using Python.
This is totally me. I've ranted elsewhere in this thread about Ruby's syntax. Maybe some clever person will write a Python-to-Ruby translator someday so you can use Rails without having to deal with Ruby syntax.
> inertia matters a lot
I'm just a little surprised the momentum isn't swinging back to Python. Since IMHO Ruby's syntax makes the language...very undesirable, and if I was forced to use it to take advantage of tools that only exist in Ruby-land, I'd be looking to switch back to Python as soon as the tools were ported -- and even devote effort to helping with ports.
Everybody was excited about Perl in the beginning, but very few people still code in Perl these days. I think Ruby suffers from similar problems and will eventually be eaten by Python.