Update: I did not read the document thoroughly enough. The answers to my questions:

“We had some contact with potential teams from the Python arena, but there were not sufficiently many who were qualified enough. In the end, only one formal request for participation was submitted, so we did not admit Python into the contest.”
“It was impossible to find Ruby-on-Rails teams (“we are too busyâ€?). “

In August 2005, I wrote in my personal blog (german):

Now, after hacking PHP for virtually twelve hours a day the last three weeks (with a few exceptions), I know that this language isn’t suited for people with a sensitive mind like mine. Its a particularly bad idea to begin by dumping out some quick & dirty code and then refactor this into a clean Model-View-Controller application (I think I have to read up on agile software development). PHP’s type-free variables together with my own web framework, which uses HTTP request and session as a shared hashtable for beans (like Model 2/Struts, naive, I know, …), lead to sheer debugging horror. After this I resolved to return to the world of static typing.

So I actually wanted to get back to Java — or any other statically typed language offering a sufficiently powerful and elegant (!) web framework. Because, yes, I was a static typing zealot, and I wanted to get home and snuggle up in the comfortable warmth of the static typing safety net. But this didn’t happen (for web development), for two reasons.

The first reason is that by developing MyVeryOwnWebFramework^TM in PHP I learned an important lesson about scripting dynamically typed languages: under particular circumstances the flexibility of these languages can actually support elegance in a way statically typed languages can’t, e.g. for following the convention over configuration principle. And this is one of the areas where Ruby and Rails just excel, as we will see later in this series. What *I* did was developing PHP code in an idiomatic style borrowed from Java — what did I expect?

The other reason is that I discovered the concept of modal web frameworks which appealed to me as a very elegant approach and, again, couldn’t be done in Java. So after doing some research and taking sneak peeks into several languages and frameworks, such as Seaside for Smalltalk and some other framework I can’t remember for Haskell, I decided to learn Ruby because it has a rapidly growing base of supporters and there’s already a modal web framework for Ruby called Wee.

So actually Rails wasn’t even my main reason to making the switch to Ruby, yet it was the first thing I played with, perhaps due to the mass of training material available on the web. And I got stuck with it, because Rails immediate me taught me what makes Ruby cool. Thus, in the next episode of this series I will point out some of Ruby’s features that make me love this language.