Template tags and partials
So the first big difference I’m running into between the Old Way (Django) and the New Way (Rails), is that Django uses a templating tool like handlebars or mustache (I’m not sure how to tell which from what I’m seeing in the code here), which has the nice effect of really forcing the developer to separate the logic from the view.
Note: Django’s pattern looks more like Model-View-Template in practice, because what a Raisld eveloper would call a Controller, Django calls a “View” which then renders a template, rather than a Rails Controller/Action rendering a View Template.
The challenge is, that in order to force this strong separation of concerns, when a developer (me) wants to render something more complex in Django, it’s necessary to define a custom ‘tag‘ or a ‘filter‘ that the templating engine can then load and use. In the world of “basically all programming languages do the same thing“, this is really pretty equivalent in outcome to a Rails ‘partial‘, though the latter doesn’t offer any guardrails to prevent the commingling of logic and display, which can be a problem for debugging. But a sawzall doesn’t prevent one from cutting through a power line either… doesn’t make it less awesome of a tool. The user just needs to be cognizant of what they’re doing.