Spent my day off today diving into Django and have found myself quite frustrated with the whole thing. Working through the official Django quick-start tutorial I keep finding myself thinking: How complicated does “hello, world” have to be?
I’ve often heard neckbeards on the internet proclaim you “can’t judge something by it’s hello, world.” I call B.S. Judge languages and frameworks by how difficult it is to go from zero to hello, world. If the authors of a language or framework make your life miserable getting to hello, world, you can count on the fact that they aren’t going to make anything else any easier.
Coming from PHP I know that I am spoiled. Nothing is easier than going from zero to hello, world with PHP! Unfortunately for my latest project I need to either use Python, Ruby, or Node.js. So it looks like I’m going to go ahead and give Flask a try. I will make sure to write up another post about Flask if I end up liking it, or if I find something else wonderful I’ll go ahead and post about that instead. Stay tuned!
UPDATE: I got the Flask “hello, world” all up and running following along with Miguel Grinberg’s Flask Web Development (2nd Edition) from O’Reilly and found it much easier to wrap my head around how everything works compared to Django. Simplicity is of great importance to me, so I think I’ve made the right choice. If you happened to stumble upon this blog post by searching for “Django vs. Flask” or something along those lines, I think you’ll find Flask the better option if you prefer keeping things as simple as possible.