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Happy 20th Birthday, Django

(www.djangoproject.com)
578 points davepeck | 8 comments | 13 Jul 25 18:44 UTC | HN request time: 0.983s | source | bottom
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bnchrch ◴[14 Jul 25 14:30 UTC] No.44560718[source]▶
As someone today who is an unrelenting critic of python.

I have to say thank you to Simon and the Django community as a whole.

Its a wonderful "batteries included" framework that has launched many successful projects, companies, and careers. Mine included.

And I'd be lying if I didnt say I still use pgadmin as my benchmark for evaluating admin panels in other ecosystems.

What you all created with Django is amazing.

We'd all be much further behind in tech without it.

Thanks absolute heaps.

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chistev ◴[14 Jul 25 15:27 UTC] No.44561318[source]▶
How can you be an unrelenting critic of Python but love Django?
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rollcat ◴[14 Jul 25 15:36 UTC] No.44561413[source]▶
I don't think you can honestly and objectively criticise something you don't truly know.

There's still no framework in e.g. Go that comes anywhere close to matching Django. It's pragmatic, doesn't do too much meta-magic (I still don't "get" Rails), lets you strip away any layers you don't need, etc.

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mervz ◴[14 Jul 25 17:15 UTC] No.44562685[source]▶
I think Phoenix is very close to Django at fitting that bill.
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1. bnchrch ◴[14 Jul 25 17:24 UTC] No.44562801[source]▶
Now Phoenix and Elixir are two technologies I love! But theyre admin offering is lacking. (Which is ok today in modern development and things like pgadmin)
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2. rollcat ◴[14 Jul 25 21:15 UTC] No.44565410[source]▶
Django Admin is a bit of a trap though ;) it's powerful enough that you can build an entire application with it, custom views and powerful filtering and ACLs and whatnot, it easily gets 80% of your job done with almost nothing but a declarative DSL.

But the remaining 20%? Now you've dug yourself a hole with no recourse but a complete rewrite. It's time/money you would've otherwise spent anyway, but that sunken cost fallacy hits hard.

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3. POiNTx ◴[14 Jul 25 21:38 UTC] No.44565654[source]▶
https://backpex.live/ is a pretty good Phoenix Admin. Django's admin is still unmatched though.
4. globular-toast ◴[15 Jul 25 06:21 UTC] No.44568370[source]▶
Yep. Unfortunately the trap extends further than just the Django admin site itself. ModelForm and generic views are what power the admin site and they're exposed and you're encouraged to use them. Same with the low level crud permissions it creates. Once junior devs start doing the remaining 20% without rewriting you end up with something really difficult to maintain.
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5. andybak ◴[15 Jul 25 07:28 UTC] No.44568814[source]▶
Oh, I've been disagreeing with this take on the admin for such a long time!
6. rollcat ◴[15 Jul 25 09:59 UTC] No.44569601{3}[source]▶
It's not just the junior devs. A client once came to me with something that looked like 99.9% is just ModelForm, some CSS, and money. I should've taken 25% upfront and said no to the increasingly absurd change requests, but oh well.
7. gnz11 ◴[15 Jul 25 10:23 UTC] No.44569708[source]▶
The Django docs do explicitly state that the admin is just meant for when you need a quick admin dashboard for internal applications. Anything outside of this domain or more complex, you should consider building your own.
8. pkphilip ◴[15 Jul 25 12:45 UTC] No.44570564[source]▶
Many frameworks have the "admin" sections with very similar drawbacks. It gets you 80% of the way there in 20% of the time, but the remaining 20% is very difficult to get done.

One framework which does not have this problem - or at least minimises the problem, is the Yii framework for PHP. A very nice and underrated framework