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There are. Next.js is probably the best example. Despite having worked for the company that makes it now, I wasn't personally a huge fan of it for my own projec

by junon 5y ago

There are. Next.js is probably the best example. Despite having worked for the company that makes it now, I wasn't personally a huge fan of it for my own projects, but I also wouldn't recommend my own toolset for many others. Next.js is a fine framework for most websites and it has great support, a great community, and genuinely smart people behind it. Meteor is good for prototyping but I would highly recommend against it for anything serious. Also, in my opinion, Django is a terrible framework, full of magic and impossible APIs - e.g. the ORM adds fields at runtime that are otherwise impossible to inspect or reason about, as well as firing off synchronous database queries in getters/setters, which means there's no way to understand the side effects of seemingly innocuous code. Django feels like PHP's Magento - bloated, cumbersome, poorly designed, and ultimately a giant footgun.

sgt 5y ago
I have to disagree regarding Django. Yes it hides a bit of complexity if you want to follow the easy route, but you don't have to write Django apps as if it's the year 2010. I personally use the ORM where suitable, but I do profiling and sometimes I see the need to optimize busier views and API's. Django lets you strike a good balance between productivity and performance (to the extent that is feasible with Python - and even then you can go into layers of caching etc). Any other opinions?
- tgv 5y ago
  I inherited a system using an unholy combination of Django and Angular, and the data structures are only a tiny bit complex: it's not a simple tree, but some records can have multiple parents. I had to add one checkbox on one modal dialog which mainly affects an accounting procedure. It had to be added in the model, in the serializer, in the three places where a new serializer is instantiated, in two or perhaps three places in the Angular controller, and finally one line in the angular html. In some places you add the field, in others you add the field name to a list. Because "batteries" means in this case: Django heavily abuses Python's dynamic nature. It's opaque, and above all unnecessary. Django is a relic from the time when a POST form was the height of user interaction. That started fading out early 2000s. It's slow, and consumes a lot of memory. I hate it.
  - sgt 5y ago
    Just seems like a crappy project, to be honest. Django has also been constantly improving. It's not slow, and it's pretty decent to whip up an API with if you want to. The alternatives in other tech stacks may also be terrible - if implemented incorrectly.
- junon 5y ago
  It's not complexity, it's magic. In a sufficiently complex Django app at work, it was hard to make trivial changes to the codebase without feeling like something was going to unexpectedly break. Development times were abhorrently slow. Even hello-world response times, locally, were in the order of 50-200ms. Never again.
  - sgt 5y ago
    Sounds like you were using runserver in Django and comparing its performance to WSGI's like gunicorn and uwsgi. That is an unfair comparison. Up to 200 ms for a hello-world response time even with runserver shouldn't happen. Perhaps you should try again?
    - junon 5y ago
      No thanks, Django was a complicated mess, and Python is, in my opinion, not at all suited for long-running services in production. There are a plethora of other languages for that. Seems like you're close to, or perhaps the creator of, the project - nothing against you or the team. I just don't have a lot of positive things to say about Django after having worked with it.
      - sgt 5y ago
        Not affiliated with Django at all. I just use it for a few production apps, although they are not exactly high traffic. I have a high traffic product in use, but the backend is written in Java w/ Undertow. What I enjoy about Python is that it's great at getting stuff and ideas out quickly. In fact, I just added a new feature tonight to a Django project and that took me ~45 min for something that would likely take 3 hrs to implement in Java.
      - anaganisk 5y ago
        Yeah, Instagram like sites need to built with rust, using a react app, oh wait no it was built on top of python and Django, yet somehow they became successful. That says a lot about how much it can pull to, may be you expected something thats not intended for Django to do?
Jimpulse 5y ago
Can you elaborate on why you dislike it for your personal projects?
- junon 5y ago
  I don't like React or anything having to do with it, and Next.js is too bloated for my liking on top of that. I use Surplus and not much else, which tends to handle state, updates, re-renders, user interaction, and a bunch of other things much nicer and as such results in cleaner code. It also tops the performance benchmarks consistently. Plus I don't want SSR most of the time in my apps. If I had a landing page, I might consider Next.js. But at the same time, I might just do static HTML in such a case.

by junon 5y ago

sgt 5y ago

I have to disagree regarding Django. Yes it hides a bit of complexity if you want to follow the easy route, but you don't have to write Django apps as if it's the year 2010. I personally use the ORM where suitable, but I do profiling and sometimes I see the need to optimize busier views and API's. Django lets you strike a good balance between productivity and performance (to the extent that is feasible with Python - and even then you can go into layers of caching etc). Any other opinions?

tgv 5y ago
I inherited a system using an unholy combination of Django and Angular, and the data structures are only a tiny bit complex: it's not a simple tree, but some records can have multiple parents. I had to add one checkbox on one modal dialog which mainly affects an accounting procedure. It had to be added in the model, in the serializer, in the three places where a new serializer is instantiated, in two or perhaps three places in the Angular controller, and finally one line in the angular html. In some places you add the field, in others you add the field name to a list. Because "batteries" means in this case: Django heavily abuses Python's dynamic nature. It's opaque, and above all unnecessary. Django is a relic from the time when a POST form was the height of user interaction. That started fading out early 2000s. It's slow, and consumes a lot of memory. I hate it.
- sgt 5y ago
  Just seems like a crappy project, to be honest. Django has also been constantly improving. It's not slow, and it's pretty decent to whip up an API with if you want to. The alternatives in other tech stacks may also be terrible - if implemented incorrectly.
junon 5y ago
It's not complexity, it's magic. In a sufficiently complex Django app at work, it was hard to make trivial changes to the codebase without feeling like something was going to unexpectedly break. Development times were abhorrently slow. Even hello-world response times, locally, were in the order of 50-200ms. Never again.
- sgt 5y ago
  Sounds like you were using runserver in Django and comparing its performance to WSGI's like gunicorn and uwsgi. That is an unfair comparison. Up to 200 ms for a hello-world response time even with runserver shouldn't happen. Perhaps you should try again?
  - junon 5y ago
    No thanks, Django was a complicated mess, and Python is, in my opinion, not at all suited for long-running services in production. There are a plethora of other languages for that. Seems like you're close to, or perhaps the creator of, the project - nothing against you or the team. I just don't have a lot of positive things to say about Django after having worked with it.
    - sgt 5y ago
      Not affiliated with Django at all. I just use it for a few production apps, although they are not exactly high traffic. I have a high traffic product in use, but the backend is written in Java w/ Undertow. What I enjoy about Python is that it's great at getting stuff and ideas out quickly. In fact, I just added a new feature tonight to a Django project and that took me ~45 min for something that would likely take 3 hrs to implement in Java.
    - anaganisk 5y ago
      Yeah, Instagram like sites need to built with rust, using a react app, oh wait no it was built on top of python and Django, yet somehow they became successful. That says a lot about how much it can pull to, may be you expected something thats not intended for Django to do?

Jimpulse 5y ago

Can you elaborate on why you dislike it for your personal projects?

junon 5y ago
I don't like React or anything having to do with it, and Next.js is too bloated for my liking on top of that. I use Surplus and not much else, which tends to handle state, updates, re-renders, user interaction, and a bunch of other things much nicer and as such results in cleaner code. It also tops the performance benchmarks consistently. Plus I don't want SSR most of the time in my apps. If I had a landing page, I might consider Next.js. But at the same time, I might just do static HTML in such a case.