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Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

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Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#61

Post by mtogo »

code_duck wrote: post #49
mtogo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one of the interesting with Django is just how easy it is to get started with it without prior programming knowledge. Wait, you're kidding right? Django is positively horrible for beginning programmers because it's a gigantic framework with an insane learning curve, and if you haven't done much/any webdev before it's almost impossible to learn. Sure, you and i can pick it up in a weekend, but i don't think it…

0> Set up the DB 1> Describe a model 2> Write a view function 3> Write a template 4> Set up a URL conf How is this more difficult than or different to other web frameworks, and what do you consider 'insane' about it?

Your steps aren't too difficult provided the new programmer knows MVC (sorry, Model-Template-View), regular expressions, ORM principles, basic database design principles, understand how migrations work and how to use south, django's template specifics, and is willing to wade through a maze of documentation for hours on end to find the solution to simple problems.

I'm not noing to list alternatives because that starts flamewars, but there are many smaller frameworks that don't have such a large learning curve.

I'm also not saying that Django is a bad framework-- i even launched my first commercial web app with it-- just that it's not optimal for beginning programmers.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#62

Post by ericflo »

endlessvoid94 wrote: post #59
true_religion wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is rediculous. Everyone's app is different, and so Django is rightly agnostic as to how your settings are stored, and which are loaded. As for the scope of the problem: dealing with multiple development settings is Section 1, Page 1 of professional programming. It's a solved and trivial problem. This isn't like coding your own ORM or templating language.

Okay, let me rephrase. It's not trivial. In rails, it's trivial. The framework has knowledge of these separate states of applications. Deploying a serious, hardened service on top of Django is an order of magnitude more complicated than something like Rails. Schema migrations are yes, a "solved" problem, if by "solved" you mean a third party application that isn't baked into the framework. Having built a service that…

This is the best trolling I've seen yet in this thread.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#63

Post by [deleted] »

ladyrassilon wrote: post #35
maxklein wrote: post #6

Let me tell you the truth, though this will not be popular: Django is not a good framework. It's clumsy, inflexible and restrictive. The community is pretty much dead. If you want to work in ruby, go for ror. If you want to work in python, go for a micro framework like Bottle. I made the mistake of investing a lot of my time in Django. It was not worth it in the end. All my Django projects ended up being a big mess,…

As someone who's been using Django since the magic removal branch, its documentation is top notch, not to mention the lack of magic makes it very usable, supportable, and build-able on. I can say definitely what's going on from the top layer to the bottom layer without any black box behaviour. Rails is full of sloppy coding, lots of magic, coders who think that return is an keyword, and bad practices. I have no probl…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#64

Post by jjayl »

ladyrassilon wrote: post #35
maxklein wrote: post #6

Let me tell you the truth, though this will not be popular: Django is not a good framework. It's clumsy, inflexible and restrictive. The community is pretty much dead. If you want to work in ruby, go for ror. If you want to work in python, go for a micro framework like Bottle. I made the mistake of investing a lot of my time in Django. It was not worth it in the end. All my Django projects ended up being a big mess,…

As someone who's been using Django since the magic removal branch, its documentation is top notch, not to mention the lack of magic makes it very usable, supportable, and build-able on. I can say definitely what's going on from the top layer to the bottom layer without any black box behaviour. Rails is full of sloppy coding, lots of magic, coders who think that return is an keyword, and bad practices. I have no probl…

I agree with you that Django is a great framework, but to be fair, at least a part of the reason why there are so many bad Rails coders is that there are more of them - law of large numbers. I've also met far fewer junior-level Django developers.

> ...the general "I did something clever and unreadable so I'm awesome" attitude seems to permeate the ruby-verse.

I don't think it's as pervasive as you make it out to be, I haven't encountered this much.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#65

Post by malero »

ulvund wrote: post #5

List of communities: https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/DjangoResources#Communit... Mailing lists: https://www.djangoproject.com/community/ on the right Sizes of communities: reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/django - 4,181 readers http://www.reddit.com/r/rails - 1,994 readers http://www.reddit.com/r/rubyonrails - 921 readers Stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/django 20k tagged http://stackoverfl…

http://www.reddit.com/r/python - 22,586 readers http://www.reddit.com/r/ruby - 8,211 readers

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/python - 66k tagged http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ruby - 26k tagged

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#66

Post by andybak »

endlessvoid94 wrote: post #59
true_religion wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is rediculous. Everyone's app is different, and so Django is rightly agnostic as to how your settings are stored, and which are loaded. As for the scope of the problem: dealing with multiple development settings is Section 1, Page 1 of professional programming. It's a solved and trivial problem. This isn't like coding your own ORM or templating language.

Okay, let me rephrase. It's not trivial. In rails, it's trivial. The framework has knowledge of these separate states of applications. Deploying a serious, hardened service on top of Django is an order of magnitude more complicated than something like Rails. Schema migrations are yes, a "solved" problem, if by "solved" you mean a third party application that isn't baked into the framework. Having built a service that…

"a third party application that isn't baked into the framework." In what way is this a bad thing? South has excellent support, code-quality and usage. The only thing that would change by building it into Django would be to tie it's release schedule to that of a much larger code-base.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#67

Post by jdost »

maxklein wrote: post #6

Let me tell you the truth, though this will not be popular: Django is not a good framework. It's clumsy, inflexible and restrictive. The community is pretty much dead. If you want to work in ruby, go for ror. If you want to work in python, go for a micro framework like Bottle. I made the mistake of investing a lot of my time in Django. It was not worth it in the end. All my Django projects ended up being a big mess,…

Actually, in my recent job hunt (in Chicago no less) I saw a very even distribution in RoR and Django centric jobs. I believe outside of the Chicago area, it may even move towards a more Django dominant role. I am unsure of whether this is due to the abilities of the framework or if Python is more accessible and widely used a language than Ruby.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#68

Post by benatkin »

maxklein wrote: post #6

Let me tell you the truth, though this will not be popular: Django is not a good framework. It's clumsy, inflexible and restrictive. The community is pretty much dead. If you want to work in ruby, go for ror. If you want to work in python, go for a micro framework like Bottle. I made the mistake of investing a lot of my time in Django. It was not worth it in the end. All my Django projects ended up being a big mess,…

> My advice, go for Ruby On Rails or Bottle. Leave Django alone.

Bottle has far fewer features than Django. It's hard to believe that Django is tripping you up if you aren't using its advanced features. You're welcome to discard the Django ORM, auth, models, and even have middleware return requests before it gets to django's router in some places.

I've had similar sentiments before, but ultimately I realized that I would have to fight with this kind of frustration no matter what tools I picked. The details would have been different, but my immaturity as a programmer would have been the same.

As time goes on I get better at substituting custom functionality if a framework doesn't do what I want. This can mean custom css, overriding templates, subclassing, or just placing my own objects in place of inbuilt functionality.

Finally, for a counter-example - not sure why convore split up and slowed down, but they were absolutely crushing it with Django when they first started. They were having Django handle some requests and a more low level server handle other requests (can't remember if it was Tornado or Twisted). There are countless other counter-examples.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#69

Post by thingsilearned »

I've met a few of the creators of both the Rails and Django frameworks and noticed that their communities are very much a reflection of the creators.

DHH and crew tend to be very vocal and opinionated about their software.

The Django community (like the python community) tends to shun this type of behavior and prefers to let the code speak for itself.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?

#70

Post by flashingpumpkin »

maxklein wrote: post #6

Let me tell you the truth, though this will not be popular: Django is not a good framework. It's clumsy, inflexible and restrictive. The community is pretty much dead. If you want to work in ruby, go for ror. If you want to work in python, go for a micro framework like Bottle. I made the mistake of investing a lot of my time in Django. It was not worth it in the end. All my Django projects ended up being a big mess,…

I've got to disagree with you.

It's clumsy, inflexible and restrictive.

Pretty much anything can be swapped out with custom code. Need a custom auth backend? Just write a class. Need custom session backends? Just write a class. Need to customise a certain view of an application? Just override the url. Don't like the ORM? Just use something else. Have special caching needs? Write a backend.

A look at the release notes are full of good things and following them is definitely worth it. Since 1.3 you've got class based views that make it dead easy to create RESTful views for example. There's new logging support, you can have multiple databases with different backends.

The community is pretty much dead.

It's true that there was a lot more blogging happening in the earlier days. I suspect that the community is simply busy building new things - but a look at the CheeseShop shows on any day a healthy amount of new and updated Django components. Right now there are 7 Django projects on the main page.

All my Django projects ended up being a big mess, and I had to undjango my way out of the various restrictions it placed on me.

I'm a big fan of how Django creates structure through its applications. It makes it very easy to build parts of functionality on a plug and play basis and use them across projects.

Django offers a lot of functionality and it can be difficult to pick the right ones being a newcomer. But once you get the hang around applications and repositories and start working with "advanced" Django and Python features and apps like the built in signals, Celery, Fabric, GUnicorn, etc building and deploying apps becomes a breeze.

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