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I’m all for simplicity, but I don’t understand why the author treats CGI as a beacon of simplicity. In the example of teaching students, I wouldn’t start with d

I’m all for simplicity, but I don’t understand why the author treats CGI as a beacon of simplicity. In the example of teaching students, I wouldn’t start with dynamic websites at all. You can introduce requests, pages, urls, etc., in the context of static sites or front end development. Then it should be fairly easy to see the patterns that flask is abstracting away. Most websites are either primarily static, with no server side code, or they’re fully dynamic, where every page is generated. CGI shines when sites are a mix. One other alternative to CGI that the author doesn’t mention is reverse-proxying a single page. I find that to have more practical use than CGI.

smaudet 5y ago
After its configured, you can focus on a couple tags, and interpolating some variables. There is nothing else. Sure, if you want to learn html just write a page and reload in a browser. But that doesn't teach the simple bits of talking with a server from a browser. I def agree that there is no modern framework that has an easy mode like this - they are all abstractions which insist you learn a bunch of local, mostly throwaway, tribal knowledge. Do you want to build a multi user scheduling system to serve tens of thousands of users or robots, probably not. But its perfect for hooking up the output of a couple variables to a webpage.