I don’t know. I keep seeing this argument. I’ve been developing on the Django stack for the past 10+ years. I have fixed many bugs if mine and of others. It has been extremely rare, if at all, that they were bugs caused by an incorrect type. The closest I can think of is a typo in a method or class name, but is it really a bug if you catch it instantly? These are just not the types of bugs that end up creeping into the code.

In the meantime Django provides productivity like you can’t get many other places. It’s just a pleasure to work with and aside from a couple of setting-related places it’s code is a pleasure to read.

Has Django's ORM syntax changed recently?

If not, this is the first time I've heard someone say it's a pleasure to read/write.

I've done lots of Python over the years (Zope3, Django, flask, aiohttp, custom stuff...), and if there is one thing I wouldn't like to come back to, it's Django.

Sure, it's a do-everything toolset, but the syntax is an abomination (imho, at least, though I hope that doesn't need to be stressed every time).

To contrast ORM syntax, look at old SQLObject, Canonical's Storm or both SQLAlchemy's declarative and core implementations.

It has not but it has expanded and been polished up. I used to be pretty anti-ORM because I felt like they were leaky incomplete abstractions. Having used SQLAlchemy for a major project in the past (used it on top of Django instead of the built in one) and then coming back to Django’s, I can say that Django’s is to me easier and nicer to use. The performance is now on par with the SQLA declarative implementation. I never really loved the core implementation for being as verbose as it was. I would rather write SQL directly at that point.

About the only place where I dislike Django’s ORM is stuff around aggregation and annotation. The fact that the order in which you declare your annotations matters is annoying af and while I understand the need for it, I do wish there was a better way. Having said that, I have simply started structuring my models in a way that doesn’t require complex aggregation and that made my life a lot easier. If I have an instance of a Book model I know what fields to expect it to have and don’t worry about whether this particular time it has some specific annotation attached to it or not. That has made the rest of the code a lot cleaner.

Basically, I think to each their own, but I don’t see the Django ORM as a negative. Give it a try and see how it works for you especially if you can avoid going against the grain with it.

Tests catch bugs too. As will pylint and mypy.

Even pyflakes will catch the most numerous bugs.