I was recently talking on Twitter with someone who was considering doing their website in Django as a learning project, because they really like Python. I had some tangled reactions to this and today I want to write them down in a better format than Twitter.

Simplified, I feel that basic use of Django is fairly detached from any particularly deep immersion into Python as a programming language in its own right. You certainly will write some Python as part of creating a basic Django web app, but you'll also write a bunch of Django specific things (including Django templates and other things that are not really connected to Python code). And some of Django's magic things cut directly against how Python normally works. The more basic the web app you have, the more easily it can probably be implemented using Django's standard basic features and thus the less Python you'll write.

Or in short, basic use of Django is more about Django than about Python. Only once you get beyond basic CRUD features and into complex application logic and so on do I think you're going to wind up immersed in Python itself, with Django simply acting as the scaffolding to connect it to the web.

It follows that the more you use Django features like the admin interface, the less Python immersion you're getting. If all goes well the admin interface can save you a lot of work writing update and modification forms and processing of them, but at least some of that would be actual Python code that the admin interface is 'saving' you from having to write.

I don't think this is specific to Django. Instead I expect it to be the same for any complex framework, because the purpose of a framework is to do the standard necessary work for you. This is a feature if you want a web app (especially with polished underlying code), but a drawback if you want to write Python. If your real desire is to write Python and wind up with a website, perhaps the right thing is a more minimal framework (although I don't know which one of them you want these days and all of my references are several years old by now).

(Unless you really want the experience, I don't think it makes much sense to go lower than a framework. It can be quite interesting and it'll give you a good appreciation for the underlying technologies involved, but it's probably going to take you rather a lot of time and work to wind up with a reasonably full-featured website. And if you want to develop a deeper understanding of the modern web environment, you probably want to focus more on Javascript in the browser anyways; my grumblings aside, that's where much of the real action is these days.)

PS: If you're doing anything really security sensitive, please do not roll your own code no matter how much you like writing Python. Use well-tested, well-audited, well-maintained framework code that gets a lot of exposure so that people will find (and fix) the remaining security bugs. It's really easy to have clever security ideas that aren't, or to miss some subtle issue.