Reaction/comments to Cloudflare CTO's question on why no ones's using Django (zyke.social)

submitted 3 days ago by ifiokambrose@piefed.social to c/python@programming.dev

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I think I get why Cloudflare's CTO is asking this question. personally started using Django for backend development, boy, that thing is robust and cool, esp...

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[-] onlinepersona@programming.dev 5 points 2 days ago

What is that website? Is it a part of the threadiverse?

[-] ifiokambrose@piefed.social 1 points 2 days ago

Naaaah, it’s a standalone site. Though the UI was inspired by piefed.

[-] onlinepersona@programming.dev 2 points 2 days ago

How does one even find it and what is the appeal?

[-] Midnitte@beehaw.org 11 points 2 days ago

Never listen to people in the C-suite.

Django remains the top pick for 74% of developers.

As per JetBrains’ survey, over 8 million developers code with Python worldwide, and 64% of them use Django.

[-] refalo@programming.dev 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I've been a developer for 30 years, and used django for the vast majority of the last 15 years of backend dev work. It's familiar, comfortable and capable, and I don't have any real major complaints. No customer has ever complained about it either.

[-] alexdeathway@programming.dev 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

15 years!!!! your write blogs? as fellow Developer who uses django heavily, I am Interested in reading about your project.

[-] refalo@programming.dev 1 points 1 day ago

No blogs... I just use it mainly for CRUD apps at work for internal or customer use so it's many different projects that aren't related.

[-] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I use Django and there are some things that annoy me, like the fact we still need Django Rest Framework for a decent API experience, but at the same time, Django and DRF probably overuse inheritance and abstractions, to a point that every now and then I have to look up their source code to understand what's exactly happening.

Lack of type annotations is another aspect Django really needs to catch up compared to other frameworks, and the whole dynamic nature of Django makes it difficult to have type stubs from third party packages working reliably, with lots of false negatives and false positives. So sometimes I still have runtime errors due to typing that could have been prevented in a different framework/ORM.

So I understand why some people are adopting different and more lightweight frameworks in new projects. The admin panel can be nice, but I'm not sure I'd choose Django myself to start a new project today.

[-] onlinepersona@programming.dev 1 points 2 days ago

Does Django support async now? I remember that it was supposed to come with Django 4.

[-] phutatorius@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Does Django support async now?

Yes it does, to some extent. It's a work in progress. https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/6.0/topics/async/

[-] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

That's the other part that's a bit problematic. There is some async support, but ORM calls, to my knowledge, are still blocking. There has been some effort put into it, but I'm not sure they'll manage to reimplement it. Other parts of the framework and third party middlewares are blocking too, which makes writing async Django a bit of a minefield.

There needs to be a non negligible amount of work to make sure a given request remains asynchronous across all layers today.

[-] phutatorius@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 day ago

While your point is valid, it's a bit much to fault Django for the deficiencies of third-party middleware.

[-] onlinepersona@programming.dev 1 points 1 day ago

That's a pity.

One of the biggest things I miss about django is its ORM. There is simply nothing better in my opinion. It allows me to think about the application I want to write, not about all the database nonsense and how to join tables, make unions, or aggregate stuff, etc. I have to reevaluate if async is that important to me or not. Every other solution without a similar ORM feels inferior.

[-] phutatorius@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

There is simply nothing better in my opinion.

Possibly SQLalchemy? But yeah, it's quite good, and there are ways you can bypass the Django ORM and write your own SQL in the cases where it's suboptimal. I've only had to do that a very small number of times during the 20-plus years I've been using Django (I was an early adopter, left Zope like a .38 round leaves a gun).

It also helps that I have some decent SQL optimization skills: when I was doing consulting, I triggered the resignations of two client DBAs because they insisted that there was no way to significantly improve a query's performance, then I did it. Stupid hill to die on, all they had to have done was to have said "OK, let's prototype it and see" instead of getting all dogmatic about it. Ego's a dangerous thing in software development.

[-] onlinepersona@programming.dev 1 points 1 day ago

SQLalchemy is horrible, IMO. You have to read so much of its documentation to get a grip on things. And the backwards compatible changes they made while moving to (I think) SQLAlchemy2 make it terribly difficult to tell apart the API. And type hints were an abomination to deal with when they tried adding them (it's better now).

And don't get me started on migrations with alembic.

I wish the Django ORM could be extracted from Django and used in other projects, but then I also just want to go back to Django.

[-] Nomad@infosec.pub 1 points 2 days ago

Working with django the last 10 years. I mostly agree, but I think the inheritance thing results from the DRY mantra. Its efficient and prioritizes being able to easily change central things in the framework over readability. DRF is a decent standard, but the lack of further development and innovation ("considered feature complete") is somewhat frustrating at times. For the typing thing just enable pydantic. :)

[-] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

The post is about why no one is talking about Django, not not why they're not using it. A lot of people use it, it's still a solid choice, but it's probably far from the things hyped in social media.