The first Python web framework I used was Django. I'm really glad I came across it first because I was inexperienced at the time and it forced me to adopt a lot of good practices.
However, now that I'm more experienced, I can relate a little to what Aaron is saying here. Learning all of this boilerplate stuff is annoying! Recently, I started contributing to a friend's rails app and I found the process of learning how to use each separate little tool tiresome.
This is why I like Pyramid - it starts off dirt simple. Hello World is almost as short in Pyramid as it is in Flask. As you grow, you can start organizing and adding different things as you need them. It has absolutely 0 magic. I find Pyramid to be a happy medium between Flask's minimalism and Django's extensibility.
I think a lot of that is in the presentation of the tutorials and the documentation. There's a book on Oreilly called "Lightweight Django" that strips away all of the absolute non-essential cruft of Django and starts from scratch, slowly adding pieces from the framework as it goes along. It shows you why you need each piece and why it goes where it goes.
Django doesn't need the magic, it's just annoyingly presented that way.
I wonder. How popular is Pyramid? I ask because I found Pyramid to be quite intimidating the first time (I'm not an exprienced Python developer). It took me four attempts to finally 'get' it - the first three times giving up in frustration and leaving it alone for 2-3 months before trying again.
Now that I get it though, it seems like an interesting framework but not a productive one. I've only dabbled in Pyramid with my free time and have never built a serious project with it, but I can't imagine building anything large scale with it.
(I'm a .NET developer BTW, MVC is what I work with in my day job)
Shodan is a decently-sized website and runs on Pyramid (https://www.shodan.io). I don't know how popular it is in the general Python community, but it's been amazing to work with as a framework.
However, now that I'm more experienced, I can relate a little to what Aaron is saying here. Learning all of this boilerplate stuff is annoying! Recently, I started contributing to a friend's rails app and I found the process of learning how to use each separate little tool tiresome.
This is why I like Pyramid - it starts off dirt simple. Hello World is almost as short in Pyramid as it is in Flask. As you grow, you can start organizing and adding different things as you need them. It has absolutely 0 magic. I find Pyramid to be a happy medium between Flask's minimalism and Django's extensibility.