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Comment by maxklein | Hacker News Reader

This is why Django is so slow moving. People are not really spending time developing it. Thank goodness there is Bottle.py and Flask now.

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Not that it couldn't move faster, and I'm all for more Python web frameworks, but Django has certainly made significant progress.

I suspect most people (that is, developers who use the framework but don't necessarily contribute to it) probably couldn't tell that a BDFL has basically been MIA - it doesn't feel like development's stopped altogether (although again, yes, it can obviously be sped up, everyone's got their own pet features, etc.)

Having attended the last couple of US iterations of Djangocon, being a close follower of the django-dev list, etc. that's not at all my interpretation. Also, spend a bit of time here: https://code.djangoproject.com/ and I don't see how you could come away with the impression that Django development is moribund.

And while I like Bottle and Flask, their aim is widely different from Django's.

Django and Flask aim to solve different types of problem.

I would argue that's not quite the case. So if they solve different problems you could hypothetically use them in the same projects? Possible, but hardly the case in real world scenarios.

You could certainly use Django or Flask to implement the same functionality, but I was trying to use the word "problem" in a wider sense than that.

In my real word scenarios I'm often faced with requirements of vastly different scale and highly variable deadlines. I also have to consider the likelihood of the code being added to in the future - potentially by someone else on my team who is less experienced by me. All these things taken together - and more - constitute what I am calling a "problem".

My Django apps all run to thousands of lines of code and are well documented and thoroughly tested. It's fairly routine for the lifecycle of these apps to stretch over years, with an ongoing requirement for maintenance and new features. If I need to create a social network for my company which ties into their existing information sources, then Django is where I start.

On the other hand, my Flask apps tend to run to the small hundreds of lines of code. They're usually hacked together quickly for a very specific use case and there's very little in the way of documentation. They might not even work correctly except in fairly limited circumstances (e.g. no time to write form validation code) and might get thrown away after being used a small number of times. If I need to create a tool to allow users to purge parts of our Varnish cache then Flask is where I start.

Perhaps not everybody uses the two frameworks in quite the same way, but I find that they complement each other well.

That's interesting. Now that you mention it, I've noticed my Flask apps run a much tighter LOC count. I always assumed that was because I was achieving the same solution but in a simpler way. In any case, I migrated to Flask because I'm much happier coding in it. My admin apps are blueprint css + some really simple views that take as much effort to write as I would be spending tweaking the Admin classes in Django. Maybe it's time to have a look at Django again, now that Holovaty is making a comeback eah? hehe.

Sure you could.

People use Sinatra AND Rails (the Ruby equivalents to Django/Flask) in the same project all the time.

GitHub for example uses Rails for the major functionality and Sinatra for REST apis and such.

Why should it move fast? Many excellent software don't move fast and are a please, think Vim or Putty. Moreover moving often means adding the last stuff en vogue, and it adds bloat and dependencies.

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