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Comment by Scarblac | Hacker News Reader

Python got Numpy very early on, and other languages never got an equivalent.

And then lots of things were built on top of Numpy - image processing, reading GIS raster data, scipy, pandas, etc etc - and they're all trivial to combine because it's all just Numpy arrays.

Python also had a very friendly and approachable community from the start, and great docs, while Ruby had its documentation in Japanese only for some time.

Django is also top quality, imo. Similar to Rails. But it always seemed Ruby was only good for Rails, whereas Python combines with everything.

So as usual, it's not about the language, it's about the rest.

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Rails is far, far more popular than Django.

However, the significance of both declined with the expansion of high-tech options (Spring, Go, Scala, Node.js) and the expansion of low-tech options (Firebase).

So today the popularity of the backend frameworks of each language are less important.

> Rails is far, far more popular than Django.

Maybe it used to, but seems a lot more people at least searches for Django pretty much everywhere except US, Canda and Japan.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...

Fair enough, my information is outdated.

StackOverflow agrees. [1]

[1] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=django%2Cruby...

If you properly scope to the Computer & Electronics category to avoid matching "Django Unchained" the graph is quite different: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?cat=5&date=all&q=%2...

For people who are wandering like me, the big jump in Django searches was the release of Django Unchained by Quentin Tarantino on Dec 25, 2012.

And Django was far from the only Python web framework at the time Ruby on Rails became popular. Django gained popularity largely because it was seen as a Python equivalent to Rails.

Before then Zope (on which the popular Plone CMS was built) was probably the most widely used web framework in Python. But there were many, many others too.

I would dispute that. I always felt Rails was used by a very communicative subset of web developers while the Django users just contracted, delivered, got paid and moved on to the next project without any hassle.

I can confirm. A lot of Django apps out there. People don't make a big scene about it, and it quietly powers a lot of websites. I think one of the powers it has that no one talks about is that you can do microservices within a monolith.

I would like to hear more about this paradigm if you have a minute.

In your wsgi.py file, you specify which settings module to use when loading your WSGI application with, e.g., gunicorn. In your settings.py file, you can specify what your root url config is, e.g. a urls.py file which recursively defines all routes in you application. But nothing is stopping you from having n different settings files, e.g. settings/service1.py with n different urls.py files and loading them in n different wsgi.py files and serving them with n different gunicorn deployments.

You can also do things like adjust the settings defined in your settings.py file to use a different url conf programatically based on environment variables. It is just python, after all.

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