Is Django the way to go for a newbie?

[Rustom Mody]

On Friday, August 14, 2015 at 6:35:27 AM UTC+5:30, Michael Torrie wrote:
> On 08/10/2015 10:08 PM, Rustom Mody wrote:
> > On Tuesday, August 11, 2015 at 8:59:47 AM UTC+5:30, Michael Torrie wrote:
> >> On 08/10/2015 07:49 PM, Dwight GoldWinde wrote:
> >>> Thank you, Gary, for this new information.
> >>>
> >>> I will be looking into virtualenv and vertualenvwrapper.
> >>>
> >>> I thought that Django was an IDE. But, it seems that an IDE is one more
> >>> thing that I need that I didn¹t know I needed!?
> >>
> >> Django is a programming _library_ (also called a framework)
> > 
> > Please dont conflate library and framework.
> > Library, framework, DSL are different approaches for solving similar problems.
> > I personally tend to prefer DSL's, dislike frameworks and am neutral to libraries.
> > Which is why I would tend to start with flask + template-language + ORM
> > rather than start with a framework.
> > Others may have for very good reasons different preferences and that is fine¹.
> > 
> > But if you say equate all these, discussion becomes a mess.
> 
> Ahh. Well at least you didn't rail on me for being too lazy to
> capitalize acronyms like html.

No I am not trolling :-)

> 
> Given that until recently he thought Django was an IDE, I think calling
> Django a library is fair, as it describes to him how it relates to
> Python.  You download it and install it and it goes in site-packages
> along with all the other libraries you might install.  Of course it
> comes with utilities as well (which I mentioned).  Making the
> distinctions you are making, in this context, is probably ultimately
> going to be confusing to him at this stage of the game.  As he gets
> familiar with django I don't think he'll find this original
> simplification confusing, nor has it seemed to make this discussion a mess.
> 

True.
Purposive, directed lying is usually better pedagogy than legalistic correctness.

> As to the DSL, I'm not quite sure which part of django you're getting
> at.  Are you referring to the (optional) templating system?

Nothing specifically Django I am getting at.
Just that learning
- a templating engine -- eg Cheetah, Mako
- an ORM eg SQLAlchemy
- etc

is more fun than learning to chant the right mantras that a framework
demands without any clue of what/why/how

<admission>
I dont know Django. Used RoR some years ago and it was frightening.
And Ruby is not bad. So I assume Rails is.
I just assumed -- maybe ignorantly -- that Django and RoR are generically
similar systems
</admission>