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Comment by brokegrammer | Hacker News Reader

I'm a Django user and I'm happy to see a fork because while Django is mature, it's also stagnating because the project isn't able to break things by introducing new features.

I don't think Plain will replace Django anytime soon but it might help guide decisions.

Plain being backed by a for-profit company is also great because projects like Django could use more marketing. Vercel figured this out a long time ago.

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I'm not sure Django is stagnating. It recently added task queues as a concept, which was desperately needed, but there's not a lot else that's truly necessary. The important thing for me here is that Django has a very mature extension model – apps, packages, backends, etc – that mean that most functionality can and should be implemented as separate packages that plug in well. Almost all the Plain features are either built-in to Django already, or would do better as separate packages, and would likely receive push-back from being included in Django for that reason. Is that stagnation? To me that's maturity, and something I appreciate in a framework.

In fact Laravel is constantly lending stuff from Django and RoR. Like model attributes.

> It recently added task queues as a concept

It took me a while to find any information on this, so for others:

https://forum.djangoproject.com/t/django-tasks-bringing-back...

https://github.com/django/deps/blob/main/accepted/0014-backg...

Django-tasks seems to be moving very slowly, it doesn't have database indexes yet. If you look at the problems with Celery: https://steve.dignam.xyz/2023/05/20/many-problems-with-celer... and the complicated compatibility matrix https://docs.celeryq.dev/projects/kombu/en/main/introduction... , task queues are still a pain point.

It's definitely stagnating. Compare how easy it was to add the admin interface when the framework was still young, vs adding the background workers feature you mentioned.

A lot more testing needs to be done before adding anything. The community should welcome projects like Plain, that can move fast and break things, which in turn might inspire Django.

Weird to see “it’s like Vercel” as a virtue.

The times for-profit dev tooling has worked, it’s almost always when the profit is a means to providing value (e.g. Jetbrains), but that’s very rare.

For profit is generally a stronger signal of an impending rug pull than longevity.

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