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I recently posted about why I dislike Rails. For a long time, I also disliked Django, for somewhat similar reasons. [0] The biggest thing that I disliked about

I recently posted about why I dislike Rails. For a long time, I also disliked Django, for somewhat similar reasons. [0] The biggest thing that I disliked about Django was its templating system. Its attempts to magically render values were (and are) offensive. When I looked before, just like Rails, it was take it or leave it, and there was little sympathy for making it pluggable. Such issues, and the culture's Rails-like resistance to outside suggestion and interoperability, pushed me into Pylons/Pyramid. Today, I think Django has improved a lot, and I don't think it's fair to continue to lay the pox of being "Rails-for-Python" on it. Django now supports third-party templating engines (so the dealkiller is gone) and last I checked, the SQLAlchemy integration, while not official, is much better. They now have Python 3 support and as pointed out here, will be going Python 3 exclusive soon. I've submitted a few bugs and they get triaged quickly. I had a patch or two merged. Pretty happy with that. The Mezzanine guy is also great about this stuff. Django does follow the old-school big magic model, but I haven't encountered much [recent] trouble in working around that. The community does not seem to respond negatively to such suggestions anymore. People say it comes down to Ruby v. Python, and I think that's true, but in a different way than most. It comes down to the core culture of Ruby v. Python. As the MVC framework hype and subsequent noob-influx died down, Django was left with the core Python community of mature hackers who've developed a refined palette for simplicity. This has been Django's biggest asset, and has turned it into something that's worth using today. Disclaimer here: I was not then, and I am not now, super deeply involved in Django, either the product or the community. This is primarily based on my impressions from light observation and use. Some/much of it could be wrong. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14015270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14015270

jldugger 10y ago
> The biggest thing that I disliked about Django was its templating system. Its attempts to magically render values were (and are) offensive. When I looked before, just like Rails, it was take it or leave it, and there was little sympathy for making it pluggable. Templating is the most frequently subbed out part of Django. I'm not sure how you'd make it more "pluggable."
- rtpg 10y ago
  They made it so that you could still use django's "render helpers" and things like the middleware directly, and just replace the 'render the template file' part. Before you could always call a third-party rendering library, but it usually meant you wouldn't get things like the Django context renderers or template file lookup by default
ergo14 10y ago
I'm using Pyramid on a daily basis. I'm very happy with how everything performs. Things never get in my way and SQLAlchemy is awesome ORM solution. For me pyramid is the sweet spot between microframeworks and django. The team that manages Pyramid is extremely competant, I've updated my applications over multiple releases without issues over the years. I think what people use often depends on weather you prefer to have choices being made for you with tightly coupled systems vs sane defaults that you can customize to your liking.

jldugger 10y ago

> The biggest thing that I disliked about Django was its templating system. Its attempts to magically render values were (and are) offensive. When I looked before, just like Rails, it was take it or leave it, and there was little sympathy for making it pluggable. Templating is the most frequently subbed out part of Django. I'm not sure how you'd make it more "pluggable."

rtpg 10y ago
They made it so that you could still use django's "render helpers" and things like the middleware directly, and just replace the 'render the template file' part. Before you could always call a third-party rendering library, but it usually meant you wouldn't get things like the Django context renderers or template file lookup by default

ergo14 10y ago

I'm using Pyramid on a daily basis. I'm very happy with how everything performs. Things never get in my way and SQLAlchemy is awesome ORM solution. For me pyramid is the sweet spot between microframeworks and django. The team that manages Pyramid is extremely competant, I've updated my applications over multiple releases without issues over the years. I think what people use often depends on weather you prefer to have choices being made for you with tightly coupled systems vs sane defaults that you can customize to your liking.