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I know you are a smart guy, but I totally disagree with almost everything you said:

1. Django has a steep learning curve

-> Django has a learning curve for hard stuff, like context processors, complex queries, fixtures, etc., but if you just want to make a simple website fast, then Django is easy. Python is simple to understand, Django is extremely well-documented for beginners, and there is a lot of out-of-the-box functionality to work with,

2. Django speeds up the start of the project, but afterwards development gets slow. Real slow.

-> I haven't found this to be the case. I have found that if you make poor design decisions at the beginning of a project, it will crawl to a halt regardless of the language or framework involved.

3. Impossible to find django programmers that are not horribly expensive

-> Never tried, can't comment.

4. The django app model makes code a mess. It's a horrible model and does not create reusable code.

-> There's a difference between reusable code and reusable apps, and Django apps lead to the latter.

5. Django is instable. I have to restart my server ever minute when running Django

-> Not me... sounds like you don't use mem-caching.

6. If you use something like Pinax, the amount of memory django consumes is massive

-> Can you benchmark this against a RoR or Joomla... I think this is unsubstantiated.

7. Your site may run fine with normal traffic, but increase to about 100 a minute and the site starts giving bad gateway errors. Be CONSISTENT in your errors, django

-> mem-caching!

8. The django people are slow. It has been years and django has barely changed

-> This is crazy. Django is being actively developed... 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 were all about a year apart and this involved massive improvements including stuff that personally mattered to me like geo-django being rolled into trunk.

9. The templating scheme cannot be outsourced. You need a programmer to understand it

-> I have yet to find a good designer I could outsource any sort of HTML/CSS that didn't cost an arm and a leg.

10. The nifty tricks they have to render your pages with shortcuts are very difficult to understand. Really difficult to understand

-> I don't understand what you mean here.

Django is not a nice framework. I believed in django for two years, but I've moved on. It's a good theoretical framework, but it's a terrible practical framework.

-> works on my box!

10. The nifty tricks they have to render your pages with shortcuts are very difficult to understand. Really difficult to understand

-> I don't understand what you mean here.

I tend to concur with your lack of understanding. Does he mean render_to_response? direct_to_template? I mean, jeez, their functionality is pretty much obvious in the naming.

(Not OP, but I do work with Django every day for the past couple of months):

1. Django docs, while great compared to many other projects, are still quite lacking, especially in examples.

3. It's probably true, compared to the quantity of PHP coders out there. The average Django dev is probably better than the average PHP dev - again, quantity - but you don't always need the skills/costs of a really good dev. Sometimes you just need someone to install & customize Wordpress.

5. Not sure how memcache is related to that, but in any case - if your app can use significant caching, framework/language performance isn't an issue to begin with.

6. I don't really get the Pinax - RoR comparison.

7. See 5.

8. Honestly, coming to Django from RoR, and knowing that they both got going around the same time, I sometimes wonder what Django folks have been up to all that time ;) (To be fair, there are definitely things Rails could learn from Django)

9. Templating was just a poor design choice for Django, IMHO. Instead of using Python in the templates, as RoR/PHP do, you basically need to learn a new single-use language, which in time will inevitably get more like a real language anyway.

Regarding 1, the documentation is quite clear to me. Then again, this is an open source project and if you think that the documentation is lacking, then by all means try and improve it. If not for your benefit, then for the benefit of others like you. Speaking from experience, the core devs are very helpful on the list.

Regarding 5, I think he means that the OP was not using the caching layer which should drop the load significantly. I think he's hinting that the slowdown is from the database rather than Django itself.

Regarding 9, that's a matter of taste. I find their template tags quite good and I hate the tag soup with other systems. However, every templating system is going to be a compromise. Personally, I have no idea how to design one that would please both designers and programmers.

Your point 3 is just plain weird.

>Then again, this is an open source project and if you think that the documentation is lacking, then by all means try and improve it

Sure, but when it comes to a making a choice between technologies, most people would pick the one that already has good docs.

>I think he's hinting that the slowdown is from the database rather than Django itself

If that's the case, the OP wouldn't see much difference between Django & other solutions.

>Regarding 9, that's a matter of taste

Absolutely, as well as workflow. I'd say if you work in a place where designers write the HTML separately from developers, a templating language makes sense. If developers do it, using the native language is preferable.

>Your point 3 is just plain weird

How's that? (1) PHP is far more common than Django. (2) As result, Django devs cost more but have higher average skill. (3) Some web dev jobs are relatively low skill, so it's useful to have someone who can do them cheaply.

When I hear someone complain that Django doesn't have good docs it comes across to me like, say, I'm overhearing a teenager, who is seeing the Sears Tower in Chicago for the first time, and he says, "Not tall enough. Lame."

I have to laugh, really.

More perspective: I did graphics programming in an evil mix of BASIC and 6502 Assembly, way back long ago. Later I learned OpenGL -- a bit easier, but still a lot of learning curve, math, non-ideal docs, etc. Then I learned PyGame -- muuuuch easier. Then I was in a club meeting and heard a developer (who of course was pimping the latest foshizzle mine-not-yours graphics/game framework du jour) say something like, "PyGame? Too much boilerplate, too complex, too hard to learn." Left me speechless.

Perhaps in 50 years we'll reach a point where if anything that needs to be done isn't fully automated and handed to us on a silver platter, people will complain, "Needs a button I can push to make it happen. No button. Lame. I'm going back to bed."

I didn't complain about Django's docs. In fact I called them "great compared to many other projects". I did note they aren't perfect yet. (Basically I have the same opinion on Django as a whole)

Looks like this discussion is becoming another platform war, something I'd hope HN & Django would avoid. FWIW, I also taught myself Z80 assembly back in the day. So? If I had an alternative that was easier to learn, I'd definitely take it. Unlike the 80s, users now are a download away from switching to a different platform if they find it more friendly. I think Django's developers actually realize that better than most.

> 1. Django has a steep learning curve

That pretty much negates your intro. If it's too hard for you, then, maybe, you are not good at it.

> 2. Django speeds up the start of the project, but afterwards development gets slow. Real slow.

Django apps maintain elegance and consistency for far more development iterations than anything else I have used before. That's the opposite of what I experience.

> 3. Impossible to find django programmers that are not horribly expensive

It's also impossible to find bad Django programmers

> 4. The django app model makes code a mess. It's a horrible model and does not create reusable code.

What are you talking about? Even the built-in admin app is a pluggable application. Unless you are careless, everything is modular

> 5. Django is instable. I have to restart my server ever minute when running Django

I have been pounding (100 simultaneous connections, 800 requests/second) a server that will enter production next week for 18 hours straight now. It shows no sign of stress. Maybe you should fire your sysadmin.

> 6. If you use something like Pinax, the amount of memory django consumes is massive

Memory is relatively cheap. Memcache and MySQL consume most of the server memory on the above scenario.

> 7. Your site may run fine with normal traffic, but increase to about 100 a minute and the site starts giving bad gateway errors. Be CONSISTENT in your errors, django

Like I said above, I am running 800 requests per second out of a two-server front-end + 1 backend for 18 hours with no error and no slowdown. You should monitor your machine carefully to identify problems. Maybe you are running too many HTTP listeners, maybe you are using mod_python instead of mod_wsgi. I won't troubleshoot your server for you.

> 8. The django people are slow. It has been years and django has barely changed

We call it consistency

> 9. The templating scheme cannot be outsourced. You need a programmer to understand it

Apart from ZPT, I never saw a template a designer couldn't mangle. And some did mangle ZPT templates badly.

> 10. The nifty tricks they have to render your pages with shortcuts are very difficult to understand. Really difficult to understand

Again, I think the problem is not on the tool side.

1. Really? Compared to throwing a few pages out with PHP but on complex apps the time you save not reinventing the wheel would be the payback.

2. Hard to know what you were doing wrong without more info.

3. I've found excellent Django coders for less than $15 dollars/hour through freelancer sites.

4. The conventions around reusable code are growing up as the Django ecosystem grows up. There are good and bad examples but it's very possible to write reusable apps if you use the right architecture and separation of concerns.

5. Again. You are doing something wrong.

6. Django does use more memory than a simple mod_php setup and Pinax is a complex project but I'd like to see numbers once you compare apples to apples. ie. PHP+framework as a long running process matching Pinax for functionality. Would the memory requirements be that different?

7. Sounds like it's your server technology that's giving you those errors. You'd have to tell us what the underlying Python errors were for us to know whether Django was at fault or your setup.

8. You are not alone in thinking this but that is viewed as a feature for people trying to run stable sites. If you want to live on the bleeding edge then join the django-experimental branch that has opened recently on Github

9. Huh? Most people complain the Django template system is too simple and therefore limited.

10. I have no idea what you are trying to say here.

You do sound slightly trollish. Give us a bit more info to go on and we can have a constructive debate.

Many sites, including us run django and cope with several 100's of requests per minute, without issue, I've never had django become unstable or a single gateway issue. How did you try and host django?

It was a pretty low end server at webfaction. The point I'm making is that it should give me the same errors at low load that it gives at high load. But with django when you change your load, the errors change.

We have one of those as well, they arent suitable for any site where you are expecting 100's of queries per minute (unless you dont touch the db :)) the gateway error is probably a lack of django processes being made available to serve requests. This is probably nothing to do with the framework itself and is a hosting issue, try another provider, just my 2cents..

Specifically with Webfaction, that's exactly what's going on; it has to do with the particulars of their typical Django setup on the shared hosting. (I've had the same "Bad Gateway" errors from PHP sites at Webfaction... it's very much a server setup issue, not anything to do with the code it's running.

Exactly... It's common for epople to think that the framework covers every aspect of the technical architecture of the actual website/service itself - probably a natural assumption due to how the web evolved - Apache, static files, then some light scripting, then PHP. it doesn't - it's just an underlying framework. If you're expecting web-scale traffic - you have to engineer for it from the ground up - servers, content-delivery networks, design decisions, caching strategies and technologies.... yadda yadda yadda.... no framework is a magic pill that does it all - and if it were, it would quickly be outdated and inflexible.

Django is great, as is Webfaction, but if you're getting 100's of queries per minute, Webfaction probably isn't the host for you.

Most frameworks give inconsistent errors when they tip over under high load. Almost none have been designed with truly high traffic in mind.

When something is malfunctioning, it's not very surprising when it malfunctions evenly and error reporting gets weird.

You should monitor server behaviour and throttle traffic back when it's close to its limits. I usually see things on monitored servers (check memory allocation over time - how much cache, how much process, how much kernel, iowait time, swap for sharp increases) in time to issue corrective measures.

Tuning maximum processes/threads on Apache seems one simple way to prevent that. Memcache and Varnish are also your friends with that - anything that prevents the workload from reaching Apache is.

I would say the opposite: it's a great practical framework, but not a theoretically good framework.

1. "The Framework for Perfectionists with Deadlines", not "The Framework for Non-Programmers Who Don't Know How Pick Up A Framework"

2. What?

3. Good talent is generally not free. Turns out that right now, a lot of good talent happens to like Django. Perhaps this indicates something, hm?

4. As opposed to writing raw SQL for different RDBMS's?

5. What?

6. If you use something large like Photoshop, the amount of memory it consumes is large, too. Pinax is a large collection of apps. Turn off the parts you don't need!

7. What? Setting up sites to handle 1k reqs/second is trivial with a little bit of caching.

8. Perhaps you should read release notes then, hm?

9. Welcome to Django -- don't use the parts you don't like. People have successfully used Jinja with Django to good effect. But your claim of the template language being hard for designers to understand is bullshit. The most advanced logic they have to deal with is if/else, and even that got easy in 1.2 with the smart-if tag.

10. See point 1.

You might not like Django for a lot of valid reasons -- but all of these weren't.

Do you use a framework with PHP?

> 1. Django has a steep learning curve

Everything has a steep learning curve once the framework has been integrated into an actual product. You could say the same about having to learn a new PHP deployment, or a Java servlets based product.

I hope that's a troll.