Comments on: Django and Python First Impressions – Part II

By: Adventures in Django and Python – Part III | Perplexed Labs

Adventures in Django and Python – Part III | Perplexed Labs — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:24:00 +0000

[...] Read my previous two posts on Django and Python – Part I and Part II [...]

By: Frank Wiles

Frank Wiles — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 18:12:38 +0000

Also, while what you have does work the more traditional Django way of doing the timestamp would be to just define the field as models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True) which accomplishes the same thing. See http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/fields/#datefield for more info on it.

By: Adrian Holovaty

Adrian Holovaty — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 01:52:51 +0000

There is absolutely no good reason, whatsoever, that a Web framework should know that the proper pluralization of “octopus” is “octopi.”

Spend the five seconds defining “verbose_name_plural.”

By: huxley

huxley — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 22:11:49 +0000

For something that is so easy to set up manually in Django it seems a bit wasteful to use up cycles each time you display a model in the Admin.

By: rates

rates — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 17:40:31 +0000

Welcome to the world of Django!

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 17:34:06 +0000

You know, I think it’s about the common cases. I understand how difficult solving the problem for every nuance of a given set of the world’s major languages might be – why not provide built-in automatic pluralization for the most commonly used cases?

By: Jason Christa

Jason Christa — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:47:40 +0000

I agree with you that Django should have better model pluralization. There is a great BSD library, http://www.bermi.org/inflector/download, that they could roll into Django one day or you can use it yourself.

By: Joel Bernstein

Joel Bernstein — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:40:23 +0000

Django does have pluralization:

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/i18n/#pluralization

Unfortunately, it’s an extremely difficult problem to solve globally, because the rules change from language to language. Polish is often mentioned as a worst-case because they have something like five forms of a noun for various quantities.

So really, you can either write a globally-correct system that works with all known languages but is massively overkill for simple English uses, or you can write a provincial singular/plural function that annoys translators.

I’ve never used Rails, so I have no idea what they offer, but I suspect it’s the latter.