Happy 20th Birthday, Django

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.

How can you be an unrelenting critic of Python but love Django?

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.

I think Phoenix is very close to Django at fitting that bill.

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)

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.