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Comment by sdegutis | Hacker News Reader

Huh. Your argument in favor of Django is basically "it may not be cool, but it's got a lot of libraries written for it." Which is basically the same thing people used to say (and still say) about Java, compared to something "cool" and "new" like, say, Django or Rails (at the time). In other words, Django used to be picked because it was the hot new thing, but since then it's no longer hot or new, but since enough people adopted it, they wrote enough libraries for it to make it worth continuing to use on new projects.

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Was Django ever the hot new thing? Python certainly isn't and has never been "hot."

In the 2000s, it seems much more like all the attention went to RoR. Now all the attention goes to JavaScript.

In the meantime, Django has steadily added new functionality while adhering to smart core principles. It really does seem to be in the sweet spot of dependability and convenience. I don't think anything else is faster to develop with.

You must have been asleep 5-10 years ago when Rails and Django were repeatedly being pitched against each other by hipster developers, leaving PHP, looking for the "new thing".

They were both scorching hot until somebody decided doing everything in Javascript was a good idea.

(Edit FTR: Given the topic thread, I feel it important to say that I didn't mean Node et al are better than Django, just that these hipsters thought —by virtue of being newer and newer is always better— it time to move on. I'm a Django dev and judging by the positive state of development, will be for a LONG time.)

I guess I remember all the hype going to Rails, not Django. For example, dozens of coding bootcamps used a Rails curriculum but I haven't heard of a single one which taught Django.

>* In other words, Django used to be picked because it was the hot new thing, but since then it's no longer hot or new, but since enough people adopted it, they wrote enough libraries for it to make it worth continuing to use on new projects.*

Yeah, in other words, it's now both mature and with a rich ecosystem. Just the ticket!

And I wouldn't even say that people went for it because it was "hot new" back in the day. People went for it because it solved their problems. Being in fashion was never it's strong point, Rails and Node/Express did far better with that.

> In other words, Django used to be picked because it was the hot new thing

I picked up Django in February 2006, in fact the (very cool) boss I had back then picked it up for me and my other programmer colleague, I think it was version 0.96 (or maybe 0.92 ?, not sure). Anyway, we didn't pick Django because it was "new and cool", my boss had a business to run (which folded two years later for unrelated reasons), but instead because Django seemed like a pretty good candidate back then at doing a decent job. Which it did, admirably well, I think ours might have been one of the first lead-management systems built on top of Django's admin interface (lots of monkey-patching involved, which is still one of my "guilty" soft-spots as a programmer 10 years later).

Anyway, web programming back then was, how to put it, in a very interesting place. In Python's case we had Zope/Plone, which had sort of its separate ecosystem doing weird (but sometimes very interesting things) like an object-oriented database (hello, ZODB!) with a very interesing routing mechanism on top of it, Quixote (https://wiki.python.org/moin/Quixote) and mod_python (on top of which I built my first personal Python web-project). PHP was the hot thing, even though not the newest thing, Java's web offering consisted in Struts and some other thing which had a related name for which you needed to be an "Java architect" in order to put 2 forms and 3 templates together, Rails was just about to be launched, ASP was a joke (at least according to my other programmer colleague, who was also teaching ASP at University) and I won't comment on Perl, of which I know not too many things (and which seemed pretty cool, I have to admit).

Considering all this of course that Django (and Rails) was a huge breath of fresh air. People nowadays take things like JS web frameworks for granted, but until not too long ago the web was a very different place (which sometimes I really miss).

Well, that's basically it. It certainly isn't cutting edge, nor anything close to it. It's stable and boring. Some people like that, believe it or not.

And there's still a lot of stuff - even new projects - written in Java and on the JVM.

Sometimes maturity trumps fads, in other words boring > hot.

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