Bill Prin billprin.com

Why I ditched Django for NextJS  ↦

If you’re feeling the FOMO of JavaScript or you’re writing “spaghetti code” just to do something a NextJS component would do out of the box, then read this post from Bill Prin on why he moved from Django to NextJS.

The summary is that using a language like Python or Ruby for a significant web project has increasingly gotten less reasonable over time to the point where now, in 2022, it’s getting hard to justify. By not keeping your web stack in pure Javascript, you are making your life unnecessarily difficult (as usual, we’ll include languages like TypeScript as part of the JavaScript ecosystem). You will almost certainly invest a bunch of time-solving problems that would be automatically solved for you if you just stuck with JavaScript.

I will provide specific examples of solving problems using Django that would have been trivially solved in NextJS.

He goes on to share two reasons why you should use Python or Ruby for web projects in 2022.

You’re working on an existing project that hasn’t been migrated yet or is not worth migrating.
You are already a master of a Python or Ruby web stack, and you need to implement a new project as soon as possible, and you don’t have time to learn a better stack.


Discussion

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2022-11-01T06:13:13Z ago

and you don’t have time to learn a better stack. I was going along until I read this, which made me dismiss the entire post as just someone who had a good honeymoon experience with nextjs. I work with a large nextjs codebase and the issues stemming from that seem so basic that I wonder why anyone would use it over something much simpler (svelte for example) or more integrated (phoenix).

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