A little late because it was the kids' birthday yesterday, this month's Stack Report, some thoughts on Django Core.

Carlton Gibson 🇪🇺

https://buttondown.com/carlton/archive/thoughts-on-djangos-core/ #Django #TheStackReport

Marijke Luttekes

@carlton An excellent article, and it’s made me think again about the third-party package approach in a positive way.

I found myself saying the other day that I think the future attractiveness of Django will have less to do with adding features. I foresee that improvements to the documentation and guides will help make the framework more adoptable.

Preferably I’d also get more popular, modern features like type hints, but that is not a quick fix.

Marijke Luttekes

@carlton To give an example, when I was still teaching, my students (17–21) had to experiment with several front-end frameworks.

To my surprise—as they would often skip the docs and go straight for ChatGPT—I often heard the argument that they liked Tailwind over Bootstrap because the former has “better” documentation.

As the old UX wisdom goes, “If the user can’t find it, it doesn’t exist.” Django has one of the few documentations I navigate via search engine, so there’s a point.

Carlton Gibson 🇪🇺

@mahryekuh thanks Marijke l, yes, I think I agree. Mentally we could ask what we’d do if technically Django were frozen? How would we advance it then?

Obvs we’ll keep advancing, but I think the answer to that is where the low hanging fruit really is. (Sometimes the **if only we had X new feature** is catnip)

Marijke Luttekes

@carlton I doubt Django would be frozen feature-wise, since the majority of contributions center around code.

Not everyone thinks about pure documentation changes as a form of contribution, and it almost feels like the translation team lives in obscurity (as in, they’re not mentioned enough in the process).

I think Django would be OK if temporarily feature frozen because there is already a lot and in packages. However…

Carlton Gibson 🇪🇺

@mahryekuh Sure! I meant as a **mental exercise** only. If I **imagine** that I can't change the code, what then?

Carlton Gibson 🇪🇺

@mahryekuh But massive +1 to boosting our recognition of non-code contributions! (Long-burning topic, I'm not sure how much progress we're making on...)

Marijke Luttekes

@carlton We should not fall into the trap of being weary of all that is new. Yes, a lot of “of this would be fun” could be catnip, but not all.

We cannot deny that typehinted, async, quick to set up frameworks and packages have gained popularity in rapid speed.

Now, I have my own reservations about some of these, but you cannot deny that a new generation of developers has different expectations than the older ones.

Carlton Gibson 🇪🇺

@mahryekuh I don’t think I’m saying anything in that direction

Marijke Luttekes

@carlton Thanks! I wonder how long before we have to get Daniele on board of this conversation. Although he Djangonaut Space session is already enlightening, and I should probably watch it again.

Marijke Luttekes

@carlton I went on a little side quest there.