Nice article as far as it goes. I've always felt that the productivity of all developers is affected greatly by all the other mundane tasks that surround the programming - communications, deployment, answering the phone, logging in, futzing in general - and that they are much better targets for productivity improvement. That's why I find the recent rails vs. php deployment discussion very interesting. I've been working on a django app for a while, and while I enjoy the language and framework, I suspect any (slim) productivity increase I have gained will be negated by the deployment.