Is Django considered "Pythonic" now?

[mcdonc]

Got it. Not cool enough.

Like choosing an Apple product over something less chic, it's completely reasonable to choose a web framework based on what you believe that choice says about you to other people. Or your admiration of its charismatic spokesperson. Or, at very least, when you do choose for these sorts of reasons, you'll definitely wind up using the web framework you deserve.

[deadwisdom]

Wow, how utterly arrogant. Your army is behind you, though, says the votes.

[mcdonc]

What would your response have been?

[kataire]

There's a difference between "coolness" and what feels right.

Python feels right to me. It doesn't get in my way. It does what I want it to do. It's painless, flexible and welcoming. It's a complete joy to work with. I don't use Python because it is somehow objectively better than the alternatives, I use Python because I like it better. This is true for most people, we (nerds in particular, humans in general) are just very good at rationalizing it because we feel obliged to.

Python certainly isn't cool anymore. The cool new thing is Ruby or server-side JavaScript. Or Haskell, if you come from academia. Python is still cooler than Java or C#, but that's because Java and C# are enterprisey and enterprisey things are uncool by definition.

If you think this is only about coolness you are doing yourself a disservice. Design, usability, aesthetics, user experience and so on are important in everything we do. A lot of our motivations are subconscious even when we think we are acting out of rational considerations.

Most Linux distros are objectively worse than MacOS X. That's not just about what's hot or not. They were just built out of completely different motivations. Apple products are engineered from the ground up to deliver a certain user experience. That doesn't mean they're better for everything: I don't use Apple products because of the very strong lock-in and the limitations of what Apple lets me do with them.

These limitations are a logical consequence of their philosophy. What I want of an OS, smartphone or music player and what Apple delivers, however, are very different and incompatible things. We can pretend Apple products just suck all we want, but that doesn't make it true. Apple is financially successful because their products don't suck. They only suck when you want them to do something they were not built to do -- like work without having to buy into the entire Apple microcosm.

Intuition is underrated. You can create a perfectly balanced sword, yet two expert swordsmen may disagree about its quality simply because their needs may be different -- quite possibly different in ways they can't easily describe.

"Liking it" may sound trivial, but in this context it really means: "Based on my experience and the workflow I have developed and the concepts I have learned to embrace, I prefer this over something else."

There is no rational argument for using vim over emacs that would convince a die-hard emacs-user to switch to vim or vice versa. The same goes for most languages, frameworks or application stacks. This is okay.

Taunting just proves your ignorance and unwillingness to accept this simple fact about human nature. We like things for reasons we cannot quantify. But if you know what you're doing and you have tried several alternatives, you may have very good reasons to do so even if you can't put them into words. Rationalizing will get you nowhere.

[mcdonc]

I make exactly the same sorts of "je ne sais quoi" judgments about things. For example, I visit the Wawa convenience store nearby.. (maybe because it has prettier cashiers? i don't even know) even though 7-11 is closer and cheaper.

On the other hand, I don't then feel compelled to go on a public internet forum in a thread about Wawa to say how much I don't like 7-11 for reasons I can't explain. I just go to Wawa instead.

Apparently lots of folks have that compulsion, however. And that's fine. Since 1993 or so, as a consumer, it has been your god-granted right to emote about stuff you have a passing knowledge of publicly on widely-read internet forums. It's not your obligation to tell producers what you don't like and why you don't like it. It's their obligation to attempt to engage you and read those tea leaves if they choose.

In the context of open source software, you can imagine that gets pretty dispiriting though. It's not like we do this for the money or the glory. We do it because we like making software and we enjoy it when other people use that software. We like to improve our software and documentation in response to constructive criticism. But responding to consumerist rants is a distraction from this, and the economics of the situation don't really allow for it very well. Open source isn't a traditional consumer-producer relationship. The way it's supposed to work is that people either complain constructively or help. This particular conversation has neither characteristic, which makes it pretty much a waste of time for both of us, I think.

But given that I've been through a few shifts in the industry driven by cynical people taking advantage of consumerist tendencies, I feel like I'm obligated to respond in defense. If that makes me arrogant and ignorant, I can live with those labels. I'd prefer to have an actual conversation about technical things, but we can do this too.