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Re:Ask HN: Python gaining popularity by Tichy on Saturday October 02, 2010 @05:35AM (#1750138)
Is Django really good, though? Everytime I look at it I end up thinking "eeeew, why do they do it like that". That it is popular is no indicator - PHP is popular, too.

Trying to remember some examples that I didn't like. The ORM mapper was ugly, and I think the templating system is really inflexible - like you can not use it isolated from Django, or it couldn't do "inheritance", or something like that.

Re:Ask HN: Python gaining popularity by simonw on Saturday October 02, 2010 @06:09AM (#1750171)
I think it's good. (Disclaimer: I'm a co-creator of Django)

The ORM is Django's most powerful component, IMO. The syntax can look a bit off-putting at first (the double underscore stuff) but it's amazing how productive it can be at the sort of queries that make up the bulk of any web app. I guess maybe it's an acquired taste.

Inheritance is a key concept of the template system, and one of its most useful features.

You absolutely can use the template system outside of Django, but it's not available as a separate package so you still end up with the rest of Django is a dependency - definitely not ideal. Jinja is a very neat rewrite of Django's template system that is available as a separate package.

Re:Ask HN: Python gaining popularity by Tichy on Saturday October 02, 2010 @07:08AM (#1750228)
Thanks for the info. It's been a while since I looked at it, and I certainly only did a very superficial evaluation.