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I feel like I just got into a time machine - this is the top post on hacker news? People are learning Django in 2018? I guess its fine if you have a small proj

by jaffee 8y ago

I feel like I just got into a time machine - this is the top post on hacker news? People are learning Django in 2018? I guess its fine if you have a small project and aren't going to see much traffic, but Python is so slow and difficult to maintian compared to (e.g.) Go. I say this as someone who worked in Python for a long time, and on several large Django projects.

cosarara 8y ago
Does go have a web framework that does as much for you as django?
- djstein 8y ago
  I know this was rhetorical, but no, it doesn't
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- pbreit 8y ago
  I'd like to see one that does 1/4 to 1/2 as much but otherwise stays out of my way.
vivan 8y ago
I agree in principle that python for web can be slow, but plenty of sites have been able to scale with it (e.g. Reddit, Pinterest, Quora). So I think saying that python is only for projects that aren't going to see much traffic is a very broad and unfair generalisation.
- jaffee 8y ago
  scalability and speed are two very different beasts. You can build scalable things in Go, or Python, or most any language. At a certain scale though, the amount you'd save in infrastructure bills by using Go instead of Python is absolutely stupid. A 10x difference would not be surprising in the slightest.
danielecook 8y ago
What makes Go projects easier to maintain?
- terminalcommand 8y ago
  I would argue that it's simplicity. I believe I've read somewhere that Golang was designed with junior engineers in mind. They wanted to create a language that young engineers could learn easily yet cannot make a lot of mess due to its simplicity. They baked all features necessary right into the language. You get a http server, ssl support, templating engine etc. right in the language. You also have a database agnostic database driver right in the language. Python is also similar in many ways, it comes with "batteries included". But in my experience go standard library is written in a crystal clear straight-forward way. My workflow (and I believe the workflows of many programs) always involves jumping to the source of go standard library and just reading the code. Django on the other hand has layers and layers of magic, you've got an ORM, modules etc. etc. Some people might like to let a framework handle everything, learn it inside and out and use it. But for other people like me, with a short attention span, django seems subjectively boring. Maybe if I didn't program as a hobby and it was my job to learn django I might have taken the time and learn it. I started the django tutorial twice in the last 2-3 years. Both the times, I got bored and left. My subjective opinion was that it didn't teach me anything besides how to "generate" a site with Django. OTOH I had much more luck with Flask. Immediately after following the tutorial I was able to write websites and deploy them. I think it's a matter of taste. I don't like big frameworks, I like to keep things very simple and minimal. My favorite OS of choice is OpenBSD, my favorite languages are C, Golang and Python. I don't like to use IDEs, I use Emacs, even Emacs feels a bit bloated sometimes. From time to time I get the urge to try one of the big frameworks like Rails and Django, but I never quite got them.
  - Karunamon 8y ago
    I ran into this problem hard while learning Rails, and a full 99.9% of tutorials out there have you using generators rather than learning how it works. As a result, I didn't learn Rails for ages, writing it off as magic beyond my ken since none of them were teaching me what I thought I needed to know. The tipping point for me was actually progressing through these tutorials a few times. In Ralis land, creating a new page results in no less than 3 files being touched. A new view and controller, and a modification to routes.rb so the page can be hit. If those pages need to interact with the database, you also need to create a model and likely a database migration to write your new tables. Once you get comfortable with the ecosystem, you stop seeing the generators as newbie crutches and start seeing them as serious time savers. It's like you're learning a Rake-based metalanguage that spits out Ruby and ERB code. It's much less time consuming to just delete any extra boilerplate than to make all those changes by hand. That said, if you dig simplicity, then things like Django and Rails (especially Rails) will be huge turnoffs. The magic is their selling point :)
michaelcampbell 8y ago
> People are learning Django in 2018? I am. So, yes.
- dba7dba 8y ago
  I am too.
- brett40324 8y ago
  I surmise I'll still be learning it in 2028!
mbrameld 8y ago
How large are we talking? Do you consider Instagram large? If so, you should let them know they should stop using Python and Django.
- jaffee 8y ago
  I'm sure they could save a massive amount of money and improve their latencies if they did.
beal 8y ago
It is current year and Django is still very relevant in web development.
projectramo 8y ago
Oh man! I feel where you are coming from but who clicked on this link except Django fans? That's like walking into a Django club and telling everyone their framework sucks. Even as a member that only gets you so far. I can't believe you also called it difficult to maintain! Because when you say slow, the response its easy to maintain, and you went ahead and called it difficult to maintain? At least give us a reason.
- jaffee 8y ago
  Ha, ok - Django is not difficult to maintain, Django is a very powerful, carefully built framework with tons of features that can get you up and running with a production ready website very quickly. Python is difficult to maintain. Full stop. Why? Anything in Python can do anything to anything else - there are no boundaries which makes it basically impossible to reason about code at scale. You need very strictly enforced code quality standards across your entire codebase and libraries in order to be able to trust anything - otherwise you don't know if some method on a class has been swapped out right underneath your feet, or if some field access is actually calling a function which is accessing a database. Go is super easy to reason about compared to Python - as long as no one is importing unsafe or reflect (easy to check), you have very solid guarantees as to what can happen at any point.
  - mixmastamyk 8y ago
    Needs change over the lifetime of a project. The flexibility that is a virtue at first becomes less so as designs solidify. Theoretical issues become problems as a codebase/team scales.
eksemplar 8y ago
It’s 2018 and people still work on COBOL, but unlike that, Django is actually really great. Where I’m from the most popular techs are .net (not core), Java, PHP and Django. Django is perfectly viable in that regard. Go may be better, but if you can run Instagram on Django, I don’t think most people will really have to worry about scalability. Go might become popular eventually, but right now, there isn’t a single golang job in my country, so you know. :)
pwf 8y ago
The stuff we used Go for was the right choice for Go for sure, but I don't think the API would have been any easier in Go (though I haven't used those frameworks before...). We also could have done Django a lot better. And all of the Celery stuff probably should have been Go, especially with the Cassandra driver we were using. Still, I'm using Django today and as long as you don't abuse the ORM and nested DRF serializers too much, it's very scalable. I think as long as you make separate services in other languages at the right time for the right use cases, it's a very valid choice for rapidly building an API.

by jaffee 8y ago

cosarara 8y ago

Does go have a web framework that does as much for you as django?

djstein 8y ago
I know this was rhetorical, but no, it doesn't
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
pbreit 8y ago
I'd like to see one that does 1/4 to 1/2 as much but otherwise stays out of my way.

vivan 8y ago

I agree in principle that python for web can be slow, but plenty of sites have been able to scale with it (e.g. Reddit, Pinterest, Quora). So I think saying that python is only for projects that aren't going to see much traffic is a very broad and unfair generalisation.

jaffee 8y ago
scalability and speed are two very different beasts. You can build scalable things in Go, or Python, or most any language. At a certain scale though, the amount you'd save in infrastructure bills by using Go instead of Python is absolutely stupid. A 10x difference would not be surprising in the slightest.

danielecook 8y ago

What makes Go projects easier to maintain?

terminalcommand 8y ago
I would argue that it's simplicity. I believe I've read somewhere that Golang was designed with junior engineers in mind. They wanted to create a language that young engineers could learn easily yet cannot make a lot of mess due to its simplicity. They baked all features necessary right into the language. You get a http server, ssl support, templating engine etc. right in the language. You also have a database agnostic database driver right in the language. Python is also similar in many ways, it comes with "batteries included". But in my experience go standard library is written in a crystal clear straight-forward way. My workflow (and I believe the workflows of many programs) always involves jumping to the source of go standard library and just reading the code. Django on the other hand has layers and layers of magic, you've got an ORM, modules etc. etc. Some people might like to let a framework handle everything, learn it inside and out and use it. But for other people like me, with a short attention span, django seems subjectively boring. Maybe if I didn't program as a hobby and it was my job to learn django I might have taken the time and learn it. I started the django tutorial twice in the last 2-3 years. Both the times, I got bored and left. My subjective opinion was that it didn't teach me anything besides how to "generate" a site with Django. OTOH I had much more luck with Flask. Immediately after following the tutorial I was able to write websites and deploy them. I think it's a matter of taste. I don't like big frameworks, I like to keep things very simple and minimal. My favorite OS of choice is OpenBSD, my favorite languages are C, Golang and Python. I don't like to use IDEs, I use Emacs, even Emacs feels a bit bloated sometimes. From time to time I get the urge to try one of the big frameworks like Rails and Django, but I never quite got them.
- Karunamon 8y ago
  I ran into this problem hard while learning Rails, and a full 99.9% of tutorials out there have you using generators rather than learning how it works. As a result, I didn't learn Rails for ages, writing it off as magic beyond my ken since none of them were teaching me what I thought I needed to know. The tipping point for me was actually progressing through these tutorials a few times. In Ralis land, creating a new page results in no less than 3 files being touched. A new view and controller, and a modification to routes.rb so the page can be hit. If those pages need to interact with the database, you also need to create a model and likely a database migration to write your new tables. Once you get comfortable with the ecosystem, you stop seeing the generators as newbie crutches and start seeing them as serious time savers. It's like you're learning a Rake-based metalanguage that spits out Ruby and ERB code. It's much less time consuming to just delete any extra boilerplate than to make all those changes by hand. That said, if you dig simplicity, then things like Django and Rails (especially Rails) will be huge turnoffs. The magic is their selling point :)

michaelcampbell 8y ago

> People are learning Django in 2018? I am. So, yes.

dba7dba 8y ago
I am too.
brett40324 8y ago
I surmise I'll still be learning it in 2028!

mbrameld 8y ago

How large are we talking? Do you consider Instagram large? If so, you should let them know they should stop using Python and Django.

jaffee 8y ago
I'm sure they could save a massive amount of money and improve their latencies if they did.

beal 8y ago

It is current year and Django is still very relevant in web development.

projectramo 8y ago

Oh man! I feel where you are coming from but who clicked on this link except Django fans? That's like walking into a Django club and telling everyone their framework sucks. Even as a member that only gets you so far. I can't believe you also called it difficult to maintain! Because when you say slow, the response its easy to maintain, and you went ahead and called it difficult to maintain? At least give us a reason.

jaffee 8y ago
Ha, ok - Django is not difficult to maintain, Django is a very powerful, carefully built framework with tons of features that can get you up and running with a production ready website very quickly. Python is difficult to maintain. Full stop. Why? Anything in Python can do anything to anything else - there are no boundaries which makes it basically impossible to reason about code at scale. You need very strictly enforced code quality standards across your entire codebase and libraries in order to be able to trust anything - otherwise you don't know if some method on a class has been swapped out right underneath your feet, or if some field access is actually calling a function which is accessing a database. Go is super easy to reason about compared to Python - as long as no one is importing unsafe or reflect (easy to check), you have very solid guarantees as to what can happen at any point.
- mixmastamyk 8y ago
  Needs change over the lifetime of a project. The flexibility that is a virtue at first becomes less so as designs solidify. Theoretical issues become problems as a codebase/team scales.

eksemplar 8y ago

It’s 2018 and people still work on COBOL, but unlike that, Django is actually really great. Where I’m from the most popular techs are .net (not core), Java, PHP and Django. Django is perfectly viable in that regard. Go may be better, but if you can run Instagram on Django, I don’t think most people will really have to worry about scalability. Go might become popular eventually, but right now, there isn’t a single golang job in my country, so you know. :)

pwf 8y ago

The stuff we used Go for was the right choice for Go for sure, but I don't think the API would have been any easier in Go (though I haven't used those frameworks before...). We also could have done Django a lot better. And all of the Celery stuff probably should have been Go, especially with the Cassandra driver we were using. Still, I'm using Django today and as long as you don't abuse the ORM and nested DRF serializers too much, it's very scalable. I think as long as you make separate services in other languages at the right time for the right use cases, it's a very valid choice for rapidly building an API.