I always expected Pyramid to offer some performance benefits over Django, given the origins (taking the best of framework X and Y), esp given that you can choose your own ORM (e.g., SQLAlchemy), etc.
However, once you're out of the unrealistic scenarios (single query benchmarks, etc.), it doesn't do that well[1]. It's not prohibitively slow, but to make the jump from something as well documented and with as large a community as Django, most developers would need to see major gains in one or more areas; performance, docs, community, coding efficiency, etc.
Pyramid doesn't offer these gains. It only makes promises about maintainability, which are hard to verify, unless you personally know somebody that you trust as a skilled developer, and who has worked on a sufficiently large enough project in Pyramid to make such claims... it's easy to see how this creates a hole that Pyramid has to dig itself out of.
Also, Pyramid still talks about "supporting your decisions", like Jinja2, etc., as if that's a problem people are still dealing with. Django supports Jinja2 even in the admin now, let alone being able to use whatever you want elsewhere. As a side note, I don't see many Python developers wanting to use anything other than Django templates (for simplicity and separation of concerns) or Jinja2 (for speed and flexibility) these days.
If the argument, in response to the aforementioned difficulty in verifying claims about maintainability, is "well, it's up to you; Pyramid stays out of the way", then the immediate response is that you're better off using Flask or Falcon; the former if you need third-party tools, and the latter if you need maximum raw speed, but still want Python. Both of those frameworks will drastically outperform Pyramid and stay out of your way.
IOW, I don't think Pyramid fills any reasonably sized and easily understood market gap.
Flask was an April fools joke from Armin that became a serious thing. The thread locals hacks and use of globals is pretty horrible. I do quite like Falcon however if I want something != Django.
I used Pyramid for a couple of large projects back when it was Pylons, and around the time of the merger that resulted in Pyramid.
Django has grown up a lot in the last several years. It used to be really hard to use a different templating language, and I personally really dislike Django's templating language. That was the biggest turn off for me every time I looked into Django. If it had been pluggable earlier, this probably would've changed the calculation for me.
I've always thought of Pyramid as the ideal framework, conceptually. It feels like you're writing Python, not Pyramid, which is GREAT. Pyramid only shows up when you say "OK, I have my Python stuff; I need to make this show up in the web browser now." It is entirely unobtrusive. All frameworks should strive for that.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of frameworks take the opposite approach. Django at least used to be an example of that by forcing DTL (is this the abbreviation for "Django Templating Language"?) down everyone's throat, among other things.
I've also been very impressed by Chris McDonough and the rest of the Pyramid team. They're extremely helpful in IRC, they keep up the great work even after spending years as a small/niche framework, and their code is very clean and well-tested, not obnoxious or overcomplicated. It's a tight, consistent framework that stays out of the way and is just there to serve the developer, not to force him/her to comply. It is so everything a framework should be and so everything most frameworks aren't that I can't help but love it.
I haven't done a major Python-based web project for many years (have one in progress, porting a Rails-based site to a Mezzanine-based site, but work on it only rarely), so I'm sure some of this is outdated.
What makes Pyramid better for you than e.g., Falcon?
From your comment, it sounds like a lot of the value you've gleaned from Pyramid is based on the framework staying out of your way, so why not use something 5x faster that does the same thing? Does Pyramid provide some unmatched abstractions? (I'm coming from a position of no true experience in Pyramid)
As far as I know Falcon didn't exist last time I seriously looked into Python frameworks, so I don't know what would make it better or worse. From a quick glance, it looks promising and I'll definitely want to evaluate it next time I seriously engage in a custom Python web application, though I don't expect to do so for a long time (current project depends on the also-superb Mezzanine, a Django-based CMS).
Yes, there isn't feature parity between pyramid and falcon.
You have event system, security abstraction, all kinds of overloading helpers for views and internal machinery that falcon doesn't seem to provide at least from my cursory look. Compare the size of documentation and configuration options between both projects.
Also looking at this http://klen.github.io/py-frameworks-bench/ the 5x better speed of falcon seems to be completly made up or occur in some very specific situation. More realisticly it looks like falcon can be 30% faster in some scenarios not involving storage - but for the price of giving you less options.
Which probably means that if you use any kind of storage the difference between those two can be ignored.
Pyramid is actually more of repoze.bfg[1] which inherited a little bit from Zope. The overall experience is still very Pylons-like, and Zope stuff are very transparent, though.
> However, once you're out of the unrealistic scenarios (single query benchmarks, etc.), it doesn't do that well[1].
I'm curious about the result since it didn't matched my experience. So I proceed to take a look at the source code for both Pyramid's[1] and Django's[2] benchmarks. From the look of it, I feel like there are too much difference in implementation to call this a realistic comparison.
From a quick glance, Django's benchmark seems to contain a little bit of micro-optimization and is rendering JSON response directly with uJSON[3] (which looks to be a lot faster than native JSON module)[4], while Pyramid's benchmark did not seems to go through any optimizations and is returning a list of SQLAlchemy objects that get passed into a custom renderer[5]¹ and render using native JSON module.
So I don't think it's entirely fair to say Pyramid is slow in a real world scenario based on this benchmark alone.
¹ Using pyramid.renderers.JSON here probably make more sense, but to match Django's implementation, one can wrap a serialized JSON into `Response` object.
I agree, but you know what; I think the new branding is worse :(
It's a shame, because I've wanted to try Pyramid since I watched their talk at PyCon 2011, but the branding (including the new 99 Designs looking logo / theme) has always made me think, "This will never really take off."
I watched a talk of yours at Pycon 2011. I very much enjoyed it. I also very much enjoy how amazing Python is, so thank you very much. I have been super excited for 3.6, because speed is one of the things I see is being most important to keep python defensible these days (with Go, et al).
You're doing exactly what you claim they're doing -- misrepresenting the article. They're saying there's possibly a virus that can cause obesity, and it might come from chickens. They're not claiming that it causes all obesity, just that it may be a vector.
