I wrote my app in Python/Django. My reasons were short:
1. I wanted to learn python, but was not really interested in ruby
2. Rails is too hyped. The problem here is that people pigeonhole you when they hear that you are a rails developer. If someone ever came to me and told me he was a rails developer, I would immediately perceive this guy as someone who jumps on technology bandwagons. The type of guy who listens to top40 charts.
3. Django just had a way better argument when it came to performance
and the most important reason of all
4. When I created a new Django project, it just created 3 files. Rails (when I tried it) created a bunch of folders and files. People have to understand simplicity in all its facets to be effective programmers, in my opinion!
I believe the problem here is just microfocus. When people focus too much on one thing, they tend not to take a step back every now and then to see if things are still the same as when you started. Let's say I want to start a business in china making valves for microturbines. I spend half a year and progress is very slow. It's time to realise that things are bad, take a step back and review the process. If things are hard, you are doing something wrong.
Sometimes it's neccesary to work hard. But sometimes is not a year. One has to take life in 6 month chunks, and you only have about 140 of those. You lose one, you will never get it back. A year is two of those chunks. It's too much time to be unhappy in.
I'm one of the fastest developers I know because I was taught the technique - when things start going slow, stop, zoom out and analyse the reason why it's going slow. Then go back in, but approach things differently. This time you want to maintain the quality of work, but reduce the time spent on it. It's not difficult to optimize that.
Well, try this. Click on the chinese course and spend 1 hour on it. You should be able to do 2 lessons in that time. Write down all 30 words you learnt on a piece of paper. Sleep on it, wake up the next morning and read the paper and see how many you still remember. It won't be 30, but I think it will be more than 5. Don't forget to click the button to view the pictures for the words.
Thanks for the criticism. Well, just try it out. 30 words is just two lessons a day - I think people underestimate the power of repetition in learning. 30 words is easy if you do two lessons a day. Yes, the text stuff is not completely done yet, it still references parts that are not online yet. That's why we have the 404s still.
Yes, I probably should preload all the answers for the questions. However, we store the mistakes the user does, so the server has to be contacted each time anyways. And sending back to the server will be useful for later when we mix in sentences and all that.
Inglingo is a simple web based foreign language vocabulary trainer. I'd also appreciate some criticsm on the site itself. It's available here: http://www.ingolingo.com
The web version is under development. The web version is more complex because it also uses the unique features that the web has to offer. So it will be out in a few weeks.
However, we are planning on selling the desktop version traditionally, and since it is more straightforward to develop, we decided to do things backwards and launch our Web 2.0 application as a desktop application first of all.