>I'm so glad to see the mention of "app" directories here. I've only dabbled in Django development, but I've always thought the desire to divide things into app

>I'm so glad to see the mention of "app" directories here. I've only dabbled in Django development, but I've always thought the desire to divide things into apps didn't really make any sense. It felt like the developers of Django had said "well, intuitively, there must be some unit of reuse at this level" and then stuck the notion of apps in there in an attempt to provide that reuse. Yes, let's say you install a module that has a specific Django functionality from pypi, it will typically be installed as an app. It confuses newbies sometimes who think that they need to worry about how to divide up their application into different applications. 99% of the time they don't and shouldn't (putting everything in a single app called 'core' in your project is a pretty common pattern). Unfortunately the docs were never very clear on this. >This seems to me to be somewhat unpythonic, unnecessary complexity introduced right from the start - why not make the reuse optional?. The file system layout becomes confusing as a result. More generally, I would expect that the most minimal Django site would be a single file, that would seem most Pythonic, but it isn't designed like that. It can be made to behave like that if you really want: http://olifante.blogs.com/covil/2010/04/minimal-django.html http://olifante.blogs.com/covil/2010/04/minimal-django.html Most people aren't using Django for that though, so it's not widely advertised nor known. >It's heartening, however, to see I'm at least not _entirely_ wrong for having a gut unease about this, It's not like the framework is perfect. There's plenty wrong with it, but it largely managed not to fuck everything up, which is pretty rare.