It has become fashionable to pair programming languages with their most popular Web frameworks. The most well known example of this is Ruby on Rails, of course. The utter irrelevance of Ruby prior to the existence of Rails, coupled with the lovely alliteration of the actual names made for an instantly memorable idiom. We shall, in this posting, evaluate the merits of each popular coupling based exclusively upon their names.

First prize goes to the recently released Haskell on a Horse. Haskell, as you may or may not know, is a wildly popular functional language which, though rarely used in business, has attracted a fanatic following of hipsters. #Haskell on Freenode is that IRC network's second most-populated language-specific channel, with over 600 users on average. The channel is second only in size to #Java.

Until now, there was no alliterative Haskell Web framework. There was Jaskell for Java, but that's only a haskell-like scripting language on top of Java, not a Web framework. So, extra points to Haskell for being the newbie to the field.

Speaking of fanatical followers, even Smalltalk is in on this action, thanks to Seaside. Smalltalk and Seaside are an easy second place in this competition, but the pairing loses points for not using some sort of cartoon animal as its mascot. Then there's Clojure and Compojure. Add points for psychologically compelling words, but minus points for misspellings.

Unfortunately, Java and .NET are not privy to the peas n' carrots game. Java and JSF, or JSP, or Spring, or Struts or... Disqualified for too many competitors. MVC is inextricably coupled with ASP.NET. This full acronym mish-mosh of ASP.NET MVC loses points for lack of poetic license, but gains points because one third of the trio is an animal. Not a cuddly animal, though.

Both PHP and Python are coupled with non-alliterative Web frameworks: Symfony, Cake and Zend, for PHP and Django for Python. I suppose PHP on Yii has a nice ring to it. And although Yii is quite popular for high performance Web development, it doesn't have a cute animal mascot. At least Python's pairing insinuates some great music.

This fall, the grandaddy daring duo of tightly coupled framework/language Web environment is due for a major update. Version 3.0 of Ruby on Rails is, as the release notes say, "All Ponies and Rainbows." Thus, we shall be awarding third place, today, to Ruby on Rails.