The question of opinionated web frameworks is divisive and has surely ruined its share of family dinners. Install django or rails and most developers fall into one of two camps:

Camp 1, amazing, I know exactly where everything goes, there’s a right way to do everything, and the batteries are in the kitchen sink, as god and DHH intended.

Camp 2 runs ls, then find, then googles ‘django without project skeleton’, then googles ‘do I check all the django files in or what’, then says ‘who fuck shit all over my repo’.

Toolbeltism

Tools like flask (or its various async clones) appeal to camp 2. They tend to integrate functionality by importing something and then making a function call to ‘wire it up’.

I’m in camp 2 but I’m starting to rethink my life choices, because I’ve spent 3 of the last 6 months writing and rewriting user login for different small projects. Now at the end of it I have a small + shitty ‘personal flask tools’ library that has a 60% working auth / login system for flask. (Note lack of github link – normally I plug my small + shitty OSS projects but this one is particularly small + shitty).

The crazy part is that I’ve met people who have a ‘toolbelt’ that they randomly import to projects and have always assumed those people are stupid and useless. When I realized mid-year that I’m a toolbelter now, I started to ask myself some hard questions.

If I’d started with django I’d be done already. Investing in learning django comes at the cost of a messy repo but saves time. And I learned from watching one of the latter-day marvel movies at 3x in the second half of a plane trip that no amount of money can buy a minute of time.

Graphql, or …

Someone posted an article to HN with some apples-to-nuts comparison like ‘graphql is better than python’ and the comments were not bad.

In particular this one which I hereby plagiarize most of:

Looking through some of the code for Sourcehut, there’s an insane amount of boilerplate or otherwise redundant code[1]. The shared code library is a mini-framework, with custom email and validation components[2][3]. In the ‘main’ project we can see the views that power mailing lists and projects[4][5].

I can’t help but think “why Flask, and why not Django” after seeing all of this. Most of the repeated view boilerplate would have gone ([1] could be like 20 lines), the author could have used Django rest framework to get a quality API with not much work (rather than building it yourself[6]) and the pluggable apps at the core of Django seem a perfect fit.

I see this all the time with flasks projects. They start off small and light, and as long as they stay that way then Flask is a great choice. But they often don’t, and as the grow in complexity you end up re-inventing a framework like Django but worse whilst getting fatigued by “Python” being bad.

Click through and read the replies, they’re useful.

I’ve come around

It still bugs me that django steers me away from the single-file case. I think that this is a flaw in every language or framework that does it – most of all in mobile native development where focusing on single-file build would IMO fix a lot of sharp edges in the buildsystem.

But django / rails also provide key opinionated design choices that make full-stack plugins possible, i.e. plugins that ‘work with the app’. These choices are:

  • standard DB connection / pool
  • the framework handles migrations, so plugins can generate tables and maintain them
  • user and session management are consistent so plugins can build on them (oauth, for example)

Django and rails both have heavy + powerful ORMs; I’m less sure of the necessity there.

I wish there were something like django-lite which provided only the full-stack plugin glue and let me do a little BYO to create a working app. I think there’s value in supporting one liners that correctly install sophisticated behavior in your app, maybe even beyond the backend – like it could create cloud resources or frontend stuff. That said, given how my year has gone, I’m 1000% invested in using the right tools, and will be shopping in the ‘batteries included’ aisle this christmas.