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Comment by acjohnson55 | Hacker News Reader

I really enjoy working with Django, but in many ways, it seems to be staying pretty vanilla while other technologies head in more experimental directions. Does Django have a bright future in a world that's moving heavily client side, or will it be relegated to a relatively bland corner of the web world?

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I personally hope django (and rails) keep their focus on the "bland corner of the web." The vast majority of (useful) sites out there are dead dull from a technology perspective, and I'd like tools that help me develop & deploy those types of sites as quickly as possible.

Exactly. I don't want exciting. I don't want magic. I want predictable. I want to be able to pump out high-functioning websites and add features where necessary. Let other libraries handle the bells, whistles, and doo-dads.

We've got a more complex application (Pathwright) running Django, and we're currently going much more heavy client side. Nothing about Django keeps you from doing this, and there are some excellent third party apps that actually make it very easy (django-rest-framework is awesome).

> Django have a bright future in a world that's moving heavily client side, or will it be relegated to a relatively bland corner of the web world?

This is one of those questions seeking controversy where there is none. Django seems to get out of the way even more when you shift to a heavier client.

he's probably referring to the ever-recurring topic of django not integrating front-end libs out of the box (which I in particular support).

I support that too, but I think Django should provide some default API endpoint support (like Django Rest Framework).

I'd be pretty miffed if they did this. You need only look at the comments contrib to see an example of something that was OK'ish when it was incorporated, but has languished since then. Now I question the need to even have it in contrib.

We don't have to bake components in for them to be excellent. rest-framework in particular moves ridiculously fast, and being separate from Django lets them do that. Also, if in the future something even better comes out, I can easily switch to it.

The 'comments' app has now been deprecated and will be finally removed from contrib in 1.8

Good catch, I had no idea. Glad to see this!

I'm not seeking controversy--I really enjoy Django development. It's just that I don't often hear about startups choosing to build in Django (well, besides mine), instead, going with Rails, which seems to have a more active and forward-looking developer community and more aggressive, or flashy new-school stuff like Node/Scala/Go/whatever. I guess what I'm trying to ask is, what is holding Django back? Is it just fashion, or are there more serious perceived shortcomings?

> I guess what I'm trying to ask is, what is holding Django back?

Why do you think it's being held back? I'm just not seeing the barriers in using newer tech. We stay pretty cutting edge, and haven't had any issues doing so with Django.

Because you don't hear about it growing in popularity or being used in the hot new stuff on HN.

MTV Video use it. Yahoo use it. Django is massive, but it's like toilet paper or condoms. If you use it, you probably aren't going to blog about it because it's just doing it's job.

Plus, it's not hot new stuff, they largely attempt to make upgrading easy.

Django to me is what .Net is to C#. It's the libraries around the Python language that make it useful.

I don't think Django is being held back at all. It's healthier than it has ever been.

Consider that the reason you don't hear about it isn't due to it not being used but instead to a cultural difference in the people who choose it. I don't think Django developers are particularly good at blogging and self-promotion compared to other projects. They communicate through mailing lists, IRC, twitter, email and documentation. I'm ok with that.

When I started my project, I evaluated a lot of different options and chose Django. One of the big factors was a cultural commitment to documentation and slow measured changes with lots of thought put into backward compatibility. Blog posts about hot startups that are using it is low on my list. (and if you do your research you will see that a surprising number of hot new startups are in fact using it)

I've seen it growing in popularity firsthand. The projects I'm involved with have seen large increases in contributors, mailing list activity, traffic on Github, downloads on PyPi over the last four or five years. PyAtl and some of the other local groups with Djangonauts in them have grown sharply over the last two years (in the Atlanta area). People from other backgrounds are more likely than ever to at least have an idea about what Django is (whereas when I was starting back in 2006 people would just stare at you).

I like playing with Go and the other newer/trendy stuff, but the thing I like about Django is that I can just sit down and get work done fast. It's not sexy, it's not clever, it's not magical, but I don't want it to be any of those things.

As a side effect of this, a huge percentage of the population is too busy getting stuff done with Django to blog and interact, aside from asking questions and getting advice. You know, like Instagram, Pinterest, NASA, National Geographic, Disqus, Mozilla, The Onion, PBS, and many more.

> it seems to be staying pretty vanilla

Thank God.

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