I love working with Django, consider it a beautiful tool, and feel significantly more productive with it than any other framework I have worked with.

However, I did not get into Django to learn how to program (or to learn how to program with Python). Rather, I got into Django after I already had experience programming in Python and several other languages. Consequently, I didn't have to learn how to think like a programmer (or how to translate my thoughts into Python), rather I had to learn how to use Django to make building web apps easier.

Forgive me if this is unpopular, but I actually agree with this comment. I don't think Django is great for beginning programmers. However, I think that any sort of abstraction is bad for beginning programmers. In fact, I would go so far as to argue that beginning programmers should arm themselves with a very basic text editor, a list of assignments, and some source code written by extremely good programmers.

I learned how to write my first web app using Django. It had a learning curve, but once I got over that I was (and still am) flying.

Tracy Osborn's story about how she learned Django and built her first web-app is great too:

http://www.women2.org/from-web-designer-to-django-webapp-dev...

    0> Set up the DB  
    1> Describe a model    
    2> Write a view function  
    3> Write a template  
    4> Set up a URL conf

How is this more difficult than or different to other web frameworks, and what do you consider 'insane' about it?

Your steps aren't too difficult provided the new programmer knows MVC (sorry, Model-Template-View), regular expressions, ORM principles, basic database design principles, understand how migrations work and how to use south, django's template specifics, and is willing to wade through a maze of documentation for hours on end to find the solution to simple problems.

I'm not noing to list alternatives because that starts flamewars, but there are many smaller frameworks that don't have such a large learning curve.

I'm also not saying that Django is a bad framework-- i even launched my first commercial web app with it-- just that it's not optimal for beginning programmers.

What framework does not require one to understand those things?

You forgot step -1> Write a test

Hmmmm. I was a pretty green PHP coder when I picked up Django and I found the only parts of the learning curve which were tricky were doing things WELL. i.e. understanding how to write elegant, reusable code. And that's hard in any language because it's about being a good programmer, rather than just learning an API.

I taught someone programming with Python and Django. 6 months later he has a job at a bioinformatics startup.

Python is dead easy to teach and Django is dead easy to apply for newbies.