Comment by c4urself | Hacker News Reader

Comment by c4urself | Hacker News Reader

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tl;dr; (Not meant as a smart-ass comment but...) they're busy building stuff.

I think one of the interesting with Django is just how easy it is to get started with it without prior programming knowledge. I believe this has to do with Python itself and the great docs on Djangoproject.com

Just start doing the tutorial and voila. This has introduced a large amount of new programmers to Django and Python, making it gain in popularity extremely quickly. Case in point: when Django 1.0 came out the "core team" was often on Google Groups "django-users" answering even the most basic questions about programming.

Now most have moved on from Lawrence to businesses of their own; e.g. they're building cool new things. Other users within the Django community need to take over the baton and build up the community. I truly think there are tons of developers out there that are just using Django and haven't taken time to contribute back (I'm partly looking at myself) I think a new surge can take place in Django development in that respect; the user base Django has accrued over the years need to start returning the investment as it were.

Speaking for myself, I've been able to find most if not all information I needed online, and haven't so much needed to go to meetups or even irc and google groups. In this respect the lack of Django community you speak of rests on my shoulders and other Django users out there who haven't taken the time to contribute back to the community.

EDIT: I'm going to make a point of being more involved in the community via IRC etc.

Yep. The docs are top-notch. Definitely the best documented open-source project that I work with/on.

It's python and everybody knows python > ruby (also vim > emacs).

The only real wart for me is django.contrib.auth.models.User -- we should be able to easily replace the main auth model and not extend it. It feels like a real anti-pattern sometimes.

I think one of the interesting with Django is just how easy it is to get started with it without prior programming knowledge.

Wait, you're kidding right? Django is positively horrible for beginning programmers because it's a gigantic framework with an insane learning curve, and if you haven't done much/any webdev before it's almost impossible to learn.

Sure, you and i can pick it up in a weekend, but i don't think it's even in the realm of decent for beginning programmers.

I love working with Django, consider it a beautiful tool, and feel significantly more productive with it than any other framework I have worked with.

However, I did not get into Django to learn how to program (or to learn how to program with Python). Rather, I got into Django after I already had experience programming in Python and several other languages. Consequently, I didn't have to learn how to think like a programmer (or how to translate my thoughts into Python), rather I had to learn how to use Django to make building web apps easier.

Forgive me if this is unpopular, but I actually agree with this comment. I don't think Django is great for beginning programmers. However, I think that any sort of abstraction is bad for beginning programmers. In fact, I would go so far as to argue that beginning programmers should arm themselves with a very basic text editor, a list of assignments, and some source code written by extremely good programmers.

I learned how to write my first web app using Django. It had a learning curve, but once I got over that I was (and still am) flying.

Tracy Osborn's story about how she learned Django and built her first web-app is great too:

http://www.women2.org/from-web-designer-to-django-webapp-dev...

    0> Set up the DB  
    1> Describe a model    
    2> Write a view function  
    3> Write a template  
    4> Set up a URL conf

How is this more difficult than or different to other web frameworks, and what do you consider 'insane' about it?

Your steps aren't too difficult provided the new programmer knows MVC (sorry, Model-Template-View), regular expressions, ORM principles, basic database design principles, understand how migrations work and how to use south, django's template specifics, and is willing to wade through a maze of documentation for hours on end to find the solution to simple problems.

I'm not noing to list alternatives because that starts flamewars, but there are many smaller frameworks that don't have such a large learning curve.

I'm also not saying that Django is a bad framework-- i even launched my first commercial web app with it-- just that it's not optimal for beginning programmers.

What framework does not require one to understand those things?

You forgot step -1> Write a test

Hmmmm. I was a pretty green PHP coder when I picked up Django and I found the only parts of the learning curve which were tricky were doing things WELL. i.e. understanding how to write elegant, reusable code. And that's hard in any language because it's about being a good programmer, rather than just learning an API.

I taught someone programming with Python and Django. 6 months later he has a job at a bioinformatics startup.

Python is dead easy to teach and Django is dead easy to apply for newbies.

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