arocks

I get the impression that you perceive building a "framework" as a self-aggrandising exercise created for the sole purpose of standardising software development into creating run-of-the-mill products. Such view would be too hard on the not-so-trivial amount of effort that goes into creating a framework that can be applied to a broad range of use-cases, far beyond what it was originally conceived for.

In fact, the truth is that it is too easy in programming to skip the painstaking effort of reading and adapting to someone else's codebase. It is simply convenient to throw everything away and start from scratch embracing the (in)famous "Not Invented Here" syndrome.

Frameworks and libraries are tools of our trade. The reason to use them or not to use them depends on the context. While it is foolish to become a 'Backbone specialist' and look at every project with those eyes; it is equally foolish to dismiss frameworks as prototyping tools.

Lots of frameworks interoperate well and are amenable to customisations. The good ones are more than sufficient for most client needs, even for prolonged production usage.

Most open source frameworks are results of thousands of man-hours of effort by specialists from different backgrounds. Many aspects like security, modularity and functionality are examined by hundreds of eyes. It is perhaps naive to assume that one's knowledge of the domain is so good that they can roll out their own framework much better than what anyone else has produced.

In fact, if that person is so capable, they should be encouraged to post their code for a public review and help others (or possibly be severely critiqued for their questionable design choices).

Also worth reading is "Don't come home to soulless Singapore" [1] that too went viral.

[1]: http://sg.news.yahoo.com/your-view--don-t-come-home-to-soull...

This is a great illustration of the difference between sites built with a CMS approach versus a custom built one, say using a web framework such as Django or Rails. It is usually easy for a non-programmer to build sites using a CMS but the end-user can often understand that it was obviously cobbled together using several clunky pieces. The result is often a poor user experience in terms of the user interface, functionality and performance.

or Haskell :)

This is true. In the Q&A of this video [1], the creator of Z Mongo Admin mentions that the browser will hang if the collections are huge.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeF_b8EQcK0

Was not sure what to expect when I first saw the title. It was a short documentary about the programming language Self highlighting some of its major features like modelessness and prototype based object oriented programming. The latter part was especially interesting to me because Javascript's OOP design was heavily influenced by Self. The prototype based system seems very powerful and much more flexible than traditional class based object oriented systems.

A cool idea and very impressive time management (though I am not sure how much time he spent every day). I liked the fact that he spent very little time in polishing the graphics by selecting a simple enough setting and refrained from creating his own music even when he knew how to. Often it is too easy to get sidetracked on such thing when one should be focussing on delivering a great gameplay which the author seems to have rightly done.

> in fact, I've heard that one of the criticisms of Django is that, in order to get to production quality, you essentially have to switch out every component of it with a third party.

This is not necessarily true. Everything in Django is production quality as you will see in several sites in the wild (including the very first Django sites).

No framework will give you the most optimal set of components for every possible scenario. In most cases Django components are swapped out for performance reasons, especially when they are high traffic sites. In other cases, it is due to the NIH syndrome where almost every component has been homegrown (perhaps trying to become more standalone).

I think this is exciting and has a valid use case. The other day we were explaining Python list comprehensions which was heavily inspired by Haskell's list comprehensions. But it was no where as concise or expressive as Haskell.

In many cases Haskell is very concise and it helps to have an option on the interactive interpreter to enter a Haskell one-liner to prototype a solution.

> "Tab-completion is now enabled by default in the interactive interpreter."

Thanks! Now I don't have to do this on every box anymore for using Python.

In case you are wondering too, the author finally chose musca as his default WM: http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=206350#p20635...

Of course, he is completely ignoring the continual Service Packs which keep fixing the bugs and adding features long after the OS has been shipped.

Most of the time, windows users are advised to wait for the first or second service pack before they start using a new version as their primary OS.

Don't understand why they are trying to fix what was not broken. Delicious was a fast and easy-to-use UI for social bookmarking.

Over the last 3 or 4 years they made their UI progressively worse: replacing spaces for keyword separators by commas, slower autocomplete and now barely visible input boxes. Delicious has been extremely unkind to it's longtime users.

Or pre-install Python on Windows like in all the other operating systems.

Frameworks evolve and adapt to changing needs. But they try to stick to their core design philosophies. Django's philosophy is quite general[1] and might stand the test of time.

Some of the reasons Rails and Django might fall into legacy could be the due to the underlying language itself. If Python continues to be affected by GIL related multiprogramming issues or lack of stronger types, then the associated web frameworks like Django would also be affected. Then there are always non-technical factors like hype and community interest.

Currently, Rails and Django have crossed a certain critical mass in adoption, they are effective for a majority of web programming usecases and have a thriving third party developer community. So my guess is that it would be pretty much a solid choice in 2016 as well.

[1]: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/misc/design-philosophi...

Netbooks was seen as a threat to both hardware manufacturers, due to their wafer thin margins, and software manufacturers, since they initially came out preloaded with Linux. The Wintel cartel quite deliberately killed it off.

I think we are both talking the same thing. I was referring to the article which criticized the Infographic for its stress on form over function.

Infographics sacrifice accuracy i.e. proportions, colors etc in favor of emotional appeal. Sometimes facts need to be packaged better for a greater impact. That's why they are primarily used for promotional rather than for reporting purposes.

This should be the standard. Today, I'd argue that class based generic views are the most complex part of Django to learn. The concern is usually met with rather blunt responses like 'read the source code' or 'try harder'.

The goals of having a class based generic view was quite appealing with the possibility of leveraging inheritance and properties. But Mixins were probably the wrong way to achieve it. The Method Resolution Order can get very confusing leading to hard to resolve bugs. It seemed to be a very un-Pythonic ("If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea") implementation to me.

This post captures very accurately the engineering education scene in India. I would add that many students today are actually aware of what they are getting into (Most of the times, they don’t need engineers but mere “coders”). Unless they are living under a rock, their predecessors have already told them that by now.

Going further the students who were pressurized to take up engineering are now using these jobs as stepping stones to reach a point where they can pursue their real interest. The good engineers are seen as capable to lead bigger teams and pressurized to enter project management (which is, in reality, resource management).

At least on the open source front, there seems to be a real community of interest in India, who seem to involved due to their love in the area. The way I see it, getting into engineering was an 'arbitrage opportunity'. That window has closed and people will slowly move on.

Calibre is not only great for ebook management but an excellent command-line tool for converting between several ebook formats. It is like the swiss-army knife for managing ebooks.

So if I understand correctly, "makemigrations" will convert all apps to use migrations except apps which were created using previous versions of Django?

Just shows how hard computer-generated music was, at one point in time. Today, it is ubiquitous and requires almost no technical computer knowledge.

I think Flat design is good from one perspective - easier to win client acceptance. The original Bootstrap is so familiar to everyone.

Even non designers have a Deja Vu feeling - "Oh, this is a very cookie cutter look. Can we get something more distinctive?". Of course there are excellent sites [1] which help in tweaking the base design but takes a lot of work.

Flat designs can be much more easily customized and developers can spend more time focussing on the functionality than the design.

[1]: http://bootswatch.com/

It is interesting to read how Haskell optimized the algorithm based on the instrinsic properties of the data structures. In contrast, C compilers leveraged on the knowledge of the underlying machine. It is amazing how far Haskell compilers have come.

Sorry to disagree, but

1. The transcript of the entire slideshare presentation is below the slide. This is the case for every presentation on Slideshare and you can skim that if you are in a hurry.

2. I dislike content-stuffed powerpoint slides like most viewers would. It is usually recommended to keep the text per slide at a minimum even if the content needs to be spread across many slides.

ZeroMQ is supposed to be a superior alternative to a broker with reduced hops and avoids a single point of failure.

More details here: http://www.zeromq.org/whitepapers:brokerless

Looks like a lot of good ideas have been taken from Emacs and applied to the windowing system; which btw is a great idea. Hope it is as scriptable and extensible as well.

I think the title is a bit leading calling him a "fan" of VB. I have the exact same views as Linus in that it was a great language to learn programming than teaching OOP to beginners with silly real world examples (Cars, anyone?)

I think what Linus wanted to highlight was that VB was a great environment to quickly get results in the real world, something which I think he highly regards. It might not be the most elegant language to program in but it had an incredible IDE, tons of prebuilt components and looked exactly as it was developed after it was deployed.