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Why does every thread about Rails on HN devolve into a thread bashing Django? Do Rails users have some kind of "little brother complex" compared to Django? Eve
by myalphabet 7y ago
Why does every thread about Rails on HN devolve into a thread bashing Django? Do Rails users have some kind of "little brother complex" compared to Django?
Every Django thread on HN usually involves a healthy amount of discussion about the pros/cons of Django, and it's really helpful. You would expect that Rails threads have a discussion about the pros/cons of Rails, right? Except instead, every Rails thread also turns into a discussion about the pros/cons of Django.
If Rails is so good then why do its users feel they have to constantly defend itself against non-existent attackers?
- sellingwebsite 7y agoBecause I've got burnt by Django in the past. If you do some search on the HN and elsewhere on the difference between two, the common answer that you'll find is that they are similar and it doesn't matter which one do you pick (given that you are not proficient with any of them). I don't agree with that premise and decided to make a case here. So if you are ever in a position to pick between Django and Rails for CRUD-y SaaS app, go with Rails. You can't go wrong with that.
- arshbot 7y agoUnderstandable sure, but why bring up Django on a post about upgrading to Rails 6.0 a week after 6.0 was released?
- sellingwebsite 7y agoBecause I too followed the common advice and started with Django (I only knew Python back then). Well, I hated it and got burnt out as a result. So, despite the conventional wisdom, I decided to change my stack from Django/Python/Celery to Rails/Ruby/Sidekiq and I am very glad I made the leap. I have seen both sides of it, that's why I decided to vent it out. P.S. Don't get me wrong, I have tons of respect for people doing open source and don't want to badmouth Django folks. But in my limited experience, it just wasn't a great experience.
- sanderjd 7y agoThis is all fair enough - you're entitled to your opinions developed through your experiences - but it's just not relevant to this article. Just because you got burned by Django does not mean it makes sense to pop into any thread about Rails and talk about how you got burned by Django. That's not what this article is about!
- dymk 7y agoBecause Rails and Django are two competing web frameworks which are majorly directly comparable, and it's good to know the pros and cons between each one. Not everybody is an expert on both, so it's nice to see concrete lists like the one posted above.
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- yowlingcat 7y agoUnless there's more you didn't explain, you weren't burned by Django -- at most you were lightly singed by your own expectations. Everything you've described is more a matter of "I liked this one more than that one" -- things that are so minor or inconsequential to the actual hard work in building a SaaS app so as to be rounding errors. On the other hand, you haven't described a single area where feature parity is lacking, so it comes down to a matter of opinion and taste.
- dymk 7y agoNote that you didn't actually defend Django, but just complained that a user pointed out a bunch of flaws of Django compared to Rails. Ironically, the OP you're replying to is much more substantive than your own attack.
- RussianCow 7y agoI don't know why you think the author was trying to defend Django or "attack" Rails? It seems to me that they were simply trying to point out the ridiculousness of Rails threads always devolving into "Rails vs Django" flame wars.
- dymk 7y ago“Discuss pros and cons” is not a flame war; attacking people for civilly discussing something is a flame war.
- RussianCow 7y agoMaybe I'm missing something, but I don't see the comment you're responding to as an "attack" at all. They're pointing out that the OP is "civilly discussing something" that's irrelevant to the topic of the thread, and that this seems to happen in every thread about Rails (which I have also noticed).
- sanderjd 7y agoTotally, and that would make a ton of sense on a "I think Rails is better than Django" article or something like that, but on an article purely about Rails, this whole thread about Django reads like a non-sequitur. I was surprised to see this as the top comment, because it seemed totally unrelated to anything in the article. If you go to the article and ctrl-f for "django" you come up empty. So the pushback seemed reasonable to me.
- draw_down 7y agoNobody is bashing, come on. People are allowed to like and not like things. Stuff like GP is not “hate” (not a word you used but one that gets thrown around constantly on here).
- chaostheory 7y agoHe's not wrong, but you have a point. imo the reason I don't like Django as much is that there's not one way to do one thing like with python ie it's not convention over configuration. That said, it's still a good, mature framework and unlike Rails, upgrades aren't going to break your app (even though migration in Rails is easy as long as you do it often). Also it's nice to have a dominant framework in Python. Just wish it had the same philosophy as Python.
- ratww 7y agoSome people perceive Rails as being in decline. That makes a lot of people in the Rails community act defensively. I think it boils down to people only being experts in Rails and fearful of having to change to other tech. I used to get the same kind of answer when comparing Rails to other tech such as Node or Sinatra.