"Fun" isn't the same thing as "functional."
I remember having great fun in QuickBASIC. And my son enjoys Scratch.
Django code is much more fun to work with than Node, but I can't imagine developing something competitive in it in 2025 to what I'm developing in Node. Node is a pain in the butt, but at the end of the day, competitiveness is about what you deliver to the user, not how much fun you have along the way.
* I think the most fundamental problems are developer-base/libraries and being able to use the same code client-side and server-side.
* Django was also written around the concept of views and templates and similar, rather than client-side web apps, and the structure reflects that.
* While it supports async and web sockets, those aren't as deep in the DNA as for most Node (or even aiohttp) apps.
* Everything I do now is reactive. That's just a better way to work than compiling a page with templates.
I won't even mention mobile. But how you add that is a big difference too.
It's very battery-included, but many of the batteries (e.g. server-side templating language) are 2005-era nickel cadmium rather than 2025-era lithium ion.
I would love to see a modern Node framework as pleasant to work with, thought-out, engineered, documented, supported, designed, etc. as well as Django, but we're nowhere close to there yet.
I remember having great fun in QuickBASIC. And my son enjoys Scratch.
Django code is much more fun to work with than Node, but I can't imagine developing something competitive in it in 2025 to what I'm developing in Node. Node is a pain in the butt, but at the end of the day, competitiveness is about what you deliver to the user, not how much fun you have along the way.
* I think the most fundamental problems are developer-base/libraries and being able to use the same code client-side and server-side.
* Django was also written around the concept of views and templates and similar, rather than client-side web apps, and the structure reflects that.
* While it supports async and web sockets, those aren't as deep in the DNA as for most Node (or even aiohttp) apps.
* Everything I do now is reactive. That's just a better way to work than compiling a page with templates.
I won't even mention mobile. But how you add that is a big difference too.
It's very battery-included, but many of the batteries (e.g. server-side templating language) are 2005-era nickel cadmium rather than 2025-era lithium ion.
I would love to see a modern Node framework as pleasant to work with, thought-out, engineered, documented, supported, designed, etc. as well as Django, but we're nowhere close to there yet.