DjangoCon: Flickr’s Cal Henderson Hates Django
Cal Henderson, Flickr’s Engineering Manager, closed out the first day of DjangoCon with a very funny talk entitled Why I Hate Django. Despite the fact that he claims to be working on “yet another fucking blogging engine” built with Django, Henderson professed, tongue planted firmly in cheek, that he hates Django.
Of course, mind you, Henderson doesn’t hate Django nearly as much as he hates smug Rails developers, but nevertheless, he has some issues with Django:
- Django team does not have beards = not serious
- Django team = boy band
- Verbose template syntax makes people cry (Henderson demonstrated how using the Smarty template system can save you three keystrokes)
- Low version numbers are suspicious (Django is only at 1.0)
- Django can’t pluralize octopus
- No mascot
Perhaps the funniest criticism was that, unlike Python, a serious programming language would not have a cheese shop where you get eggs.
Henderson did hit on one mildly serious point — that frameworks speed your development time at first, but then you often hit a wall. The framework doesn’t do what you want and you have to dig into its internals to figure out how to do what you want, which is often more difficult than writing your own framework from the ground up.
He also addressed some real shortcomings of Django, like its inability to read and write from multiple database servers (which, incidentally, is something the developers are aware of and will be added in a future version).
Of course, while Henderson’s presentation had some valid points that the Django community is well aware of, it was all in good fun and made for a lighthearted end to the first day of DjangoCon.
Cal’s slides from his talk will be available (soon, he promises) on his site at iamcal.com/talks.
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