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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>But if you're building something that you hope you'll have to rapidly scale, Django is going to hurt you. It's way harder to scale due to both its heavy reliance on hidden magic its tight integration with its data store.

Considering that Django has 1/5th as much "magic" as Rails, and that Rails powers some of the biggest websites on the world, I'd say "citation needed".

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And Django powers some huge sites as well. IMO the magic doesn't really hurt you there as long as your still working with a relatively monolithic piece of software.

What is "magic,' and how do you measure it so that you can say things like "1/5?"

Ever seen Penn and Teller?

Joking aside, generally we call "magic" uses of reflection, monkey-patching, auto-magically configured parts, parts of a framework that do way more than what we explicitly tell them, etc.

"1/5 less magic" is what we call in casual conversation "making a point" and not an actual measurement. It is however more than 85% factually correct.

The Django project leaders have stated that one of their goals was to not have "magic" in the framework, and in fact, one of the early (~ Django 1.2 or so) refactoring efforts was about removing "magic" too-clever parts for more explicitness.

What besides reddit?

There is a list at the bottom of this page: https://www.djangoproject.com/start/overview/

    Disqus
    Instagram
    Knight Foundation
    MacArthur Foundation
    Mozilla
    National Geographic
    Open Knowledge Foundation
    Pinterest
    Open Stack

If the answer here is to be believed, Pinterest has consciously moved away from Django.

https://www.quora.com/Would-Pinterest-consider-Flask-in-plac...

Yes, but that doesn't matter much, since they got to billion valuations just fine WITH Django.

Only one of the main Open Stack projects uses Django - and it is a complete pain to work on as a result.

Most of the projects in OpenStack use Flask or Pecan - or Falcon for one or two of the more performance sensitive APIs

Having used Django and that project (Horizon) extensively, I think that Horizon is not a pain to work on as a result of Django, it was just badly written.

Reddit uses Pylons iirc

But see for yourself: https://github.com/reddit/reddit

Interesting. Looking around because I thought it was ruby at one point, but it turns out it was originally written in Lisp. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit

I don't know where I got that idea from.

And they blogged about moving to typescript for frontend at least

I believe python.org, too, is built on Django[0].

Also, here's an interesting thread on Artima: "Please Teach me Web Frameworks for Python!"[1] by Guido van van Rossum[sic]. It's 11 years old (a lot has changed since?), but interesting.

[0]: https://github.com/python/pythondotorg

[1]: http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=146149

Reddit isn't powered by Django as far as I know. But Instagram is and I believe Pinterest was/is.

Nov 2016 https://medium.com/@Pinterest_Engineering/how-we-switched-ou...

The Pinterest web backend has some vestiges of Django for form validations and stuff, but IIRC it's mostly custom at this point.

Backend is still django though

PyCon's keynote this year was given by Instagram: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66XoCk79kjM

Kept a small list here, including codebase changes made for scaling and references:

https://www.wyc.io/posts/just-build-it-in-django-or-rails/

Instagram, Disqus, Bitbucket, Pinterest.

Apologies in advanced for any marketing copies you don't want to read. The information is there.

Instagram is one, I'm sure there's others [1].

[1] https://engineering.instagram.com/web-service-efficiency-at-...

Reddit is Pylons based. Instagram is Django though.

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