Django 2.0 released
There's a huge amount of talk about Django vs. Other Frameworks here, which is not surprising. Bottle and Flask come up. Sadly, Pyramid comes up. Rails comes up.I think the real crux of the discussion around which framework is best is really about the relationship between the framework and the language it's based on.Let's separate this from the Python world for a second and talk about the relationship between Objective-C and iOS. Knowing the former doesn't in any way imply that you know the latter. There's an incredibly host of things you have to know to write an iOS app in addition to knowing Obj-C. XCode, UIKit, all the different xKits there are. Which are basically magic, and the APIs you're referencing are not necessarily written in Obj-C.It is even possible to be a competent iOS developer and not really know anything but the framework. No real understanding of Obj-C or Swift is required, let alone any guiding principle of how programming languages work or how computers work, or how computer science works.That's not a dig against people who went to code camp or took an online course or just read a book. I'm someone who learned about stuff mainly by reading books. And that worked out fine for the first few years of my career. But there's a legitimate problem that you run into (I know first hand) about what you do when the framework breaks down or you encounter something unexpected.Anyone can learn a framework relatively quickly. What do you do when the framework fails for some reason?As someone who learned SQL and Python from the ground up--language-first--I love that Django exists. It's damn impressive, and only ever gets better. But I like Flask + SQLAlchemy better, and I like Pyramid + Stored Procedures best.I would probably have a different attitude if I started with Frameworks first. And again, that's not a criticism. It's just a different approach. One way to get things done is to learn the fastest way to get things done, and in many cases that's quite possibly Django or Rails.But both of those make me a little nuts when I dig into the internals. Magic isn't bad by definition. Good magic is when you can invoke a class you don't have to understand to use well. Bad magic is when you have to understand the internals of a class to work around it when it fails to meet your needs.But I think we need some context about this when we talk about which framework reigns supreme. If you're taking a class and learning to write web apps for the first time with no other experience at all, Django is the bomb. You can spend an entire career as a Django developer and do well.Just like you can spend an entire career as an iOS developer writing apps, do well, and never actually learn anything about programming. I think this is a wonderful development in our world of programming because it brings so much economic opportunity to such a large group of people who wouldn't otherwise have access to it.I think it's safe to say that Django is creating jobs for people who wouldn't otherwise have them, and that's a good thing. My 98-year-old father and WW2 vet is starting to help me with a Django app just as a thing we can do together. And I don't have to teach him anything at all about anything except that framework.It's a brilliant and beautiful framework, and I love it. But to me, it's a little bit more like iOS or RoR than it is a framework that's really ideal for people who started with bottom-up rather than top-down development.I know what I need in a new project, and it isn't going to be all of that. And I know how to quickly integrate the boilerplate things I will need. That's what repos and plugins are for.The short version of my response to everyone talking about different frameworks is this: we need them all. Bottle and Flask are great; Pyramid is great; Django is great.What you are using them for is an important consideration, as is who you plan to have working on them.