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Ask HN: Is Rails more popular than Django? If so, why?

9 points by lpnotes ↗ HN
I'm learning Django now, but before that I was interested in Rails. I've noticed -- just from meetups, I guess -- that the Rails community seems a lot more diverse -- i.e. there are a lot more women and minorities learning and using it. Do you think this is because a large percentage of coding bootcamps and online tutorials like Codeschool and Treehouse focus on Rails? Or is Rails simply easier to pick up than Django? Or are there simply more/better Rails tutorials out there?

5 comments

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ibnukamy
IMHO, there are amazing tutorials for rails available. Both free and paid tutorials. If you have the basic of ruby, you can pick up rails pretty easily.
thinkerer
Apart from that, a bulk of people are learning Ruby and hence rails most of the time as the support and gems are pretty vast.

Also, Python is more defined in terms of how you structure the code, while Ruby has more ways to express the same thing, and more tolerant of errors in some sense. With that also comes the problem of harder to troubleshoot errors.

twunde
1) Rails is more popular than Django. Rails was the first MVC web framework, and it has been embraced by the startup community for it's ease of prototyping applications. Because of this and the high-profile successes of major companies using Rails (such as Twitter) more people interested in learning to code are guided towards Rails as the first framework to learn. 2)I also suspect that the Rails community is more design-oriented than most other communities and so have pulled some designers, and front-end devs into the community
phantom_oracle
Rails is bigger than Django,

But Python is bigger than Ruby...

Django isn't the only web framework in the python world. Flask and the others (both big monoliths like Django and miniatures similar to Flask) are abundant in the python world.

Although there are also quite a few Ruby web frameworks, Rails is (by far) the biggest and most adopted.

People will tell you learn what you find easy to use. I will tell you:

Learn Ruby and Rails if you want a startup job (this depends on where you want to work and what your local market is using. So if you live in a country who is still big on PHP, then learn that).

Learn the fundamentals of Ruby or Python (whichever makes you happiest and has the most ease-of-use). A good programmer should be able to switch between languages with minimal effort (and some commitment).

Learn Python if you want broader application of programming (like a data science job or a job in tech finance).

I've avoided saying "learn X framework" because they're all somewhat similar under the hood (most of the big frameworks follow the MVC pattern of application design/structure).

runjake
Don't go down this road of "which should I learn?". Just stick with Django, and maybe, when you are competent in Django, look at Rails. If you cut your Django progress short and switch to learning Rails, you'll soon be looking at Javascript frameworks. Or Scala. Or Go.

Just stick with Django, for now. Not because it's better or worse, but because you're already on that path.