Totally agree with you on this. I think Flask is Django done right and I've been beating that drum for quite some time (see, for example, my comments on the settings file [1]).
The core devs claim that SQLAlchemy and Jinja weren't around at the time Django was developed, and that's fine. But in 2012, Jinja2 and SQLAlchemy are clearly better alternatives to Django's defaults. So why not incorporate them?
Django doesn't even have first class support for Jinja2 templates, let alone the python HAML variants.
What's ironic is that a few years ago Django was known for being loosely coupled when compared to Rails, which was considered monolithic ("my way or the highway"). Nowadays Rails is the flexible framework, allowing for different ORMs and templating systems, while Django is now the monolithic framework.
Don't get me wrong, I love stability. But when a great percentage of developers are using hacks to get around the default configuration system and to support excellent external libraries like Jinja2 and SQLALchemy, something is very wrong.
The core devs claim that SQLAlchemy and Jinja weren't around at the time Django was developed, and that's fine. But in 2012, Jinja2 and SQLAlchemy are clearly better alternatives to Django's defaults. So why not incorporate them?
Django doesn't even have first class support for Jinja2 templates, let alone the python HAML variants.
What's ironic is that a few years ago Django was known for being loosely coupled when compared to Rails, which was considered monolithic ("my way or the highway"). Nowadays Rails is the flexible framework, allowing for different ORMs and templating systems, while Django is now the monolithic framework.
Don't get me wrong, I love stability. But when a great percentage of developers are using hacks to get around the default configuration system and to support excellent external libraries like Jinja2 and SQLALchemy, something is very wrong.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3556929