Happy 20th Birthday, Django

Wasn't Django inspired from Rails

Not really, it was a strong inter-connection between the two at the beginning, going both ways, but I'd say that Django's design philosophy was its own thing. Granted, as time goes on things have started to become fuzzier and fuzzier in my head, and not only when it comes to programming languages/web frameworks and the like.

Source: me, I was programming in Zope 20 years ago (mostly hated it, although there were lots of interesting things in at a conceptual level), switched jobs at the beginning of 2006 and thanks to the new boss I got to use Django since February of 2006 (I think I still have a 0.96 version installed somewhere on an old instance, still does its thing).

Not exactly. Development on what become Django began sometime in 2003, before Rails was released.

Certainly the release of Rails — and, more importantly, the questions in the Python community about what _our_ web dev story would be — inspired us to extract the framework from the rest of our code and release it. And over the years we’ve taken some inspiration from Rails (as well as anywhere else we see good ideas). The biggest one probably being the basic ethos that web development should be easy — the focus on what we now call “Developer Experience” is the best thing Rails gave the world, I think.

Zope, shudder. It had some amazing ideas and I built a reasonably large app on it, but I’d rather swallow my own tongue than work inside an application server again.

Django and its contemporaries, like TurboGears and Pylons, were a breath of fresh air.

I liked Turbogears, but their approach of using "best in breed" libraries kinda burnt them as what that meant kept changing and leaving them behind.

It did. I think it was a great idea but other things skipped past it. I used Pyramid for a while and still appreciate it, but I can't imagine using it for my own new projects in a world where Flask and FastAPI and others exist.