Write Libraries, Not Frameworks • Hacker News Board

Re: Write Libraries, Not Frameworks

#191

Post by kevsim » Sat, May 09, 2020, 11:13 AM UTC

skohan wrote: post #141

The more I program, the more I am convinced that owning flow of control is one of my primary jobs as a programmer. If I surrender this to a framework, there are a lot of decisions I can't make with regard to performance, and I have a lot less certainty about when and in what order exactly things are executed. There are of course some exceptions, but in general I want libraries to provide me simple, synchronous functi…

This hits home for me right now. I'm currently battling some performance problems related to a lot of "magic" that happens when using the Apollo GraphQL framework and am strongly considering ripping it apart and taking back control of what happens and when.

Re: Write Libraries, Not Frameworks

#192

Post by kevsim » Sat, May 09, 2020, 11:14 AM UTC

aledalgrande wrote: post #11

dwheeler wrote: post #5

I was expecting a one-sided rant. Instead, I got a reasoned distinction between two different approaches, the trade-offs of each, and a discussion about the cases where one approach (frameworks) can be beneficial but also identifying the added risks of going that route. I agree with the conclusion, and why. I wish even more people were willing to write down a discussion of alternatives and their trade-offs. Instead o…

I like to use this approach with all team decisions. It is how you get real buy in from people, because after seeing pros and cons, they chose A instead of B.

Agreed. In one team I managed, we artificially created "red teams" to take opposing view points if we were getting into traps with too much group think. Leaves the teams with confidence in their choices and real buy in, as you said.

Re: Write Libraries, Not Frameworks

#193

Post by epr » Sat, May 09, 2020, 11:14 AM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #134

ianmcgowan wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the same thing every time reading this otherwise-excellent post. I don't think we should attempt to erase history, but it is super jarring, at least for me. Was it ever actually funny?

I still think it’s funny and I’m sure that many people still do, even if they won’t admit it. You don’t have to be a bad person to have a dark sense of humor and you don’t have hate women to find the joke in the hammer factory story funny.

Just read this to my non-programmer girlfriend and she could barely stop laughing, especially at the ex-girlfriend jokes. I really feel sorry for all the people over-analyzing these things. Like, do you think the author ever killed his ex-girlfriend? Do you think he even knows anyone who killed their ex-girlfriend? It's a joke!

Re: Write Libraries, Not Frameworks

#194

Post by snorremd » Sat, May 09, 2020, 11:18 AM UTC

uryga wrote: post #58

syspec wrote: post #26

The best distinction I've read is: When something is a library, your code calls functions on it. When something is a framework, it calls functions on your code

it's a rough rule of thumb at best though – higher-order-functions or other things that take a callback blur the line a lot (IoC, what a sibling comment said). or say a library has an event-loop, or maybe does networking and you only provide some handlers – would that make it a framework? i guess it's about frameworks being "the main thing happening". i.e. a framework controls the whole program's execution, occasiona…

I agree. Otherwise every library for languages with first class functions and callbacks would be frameworks.

Re: Write Libraries, Not Frameworks

#195

Post by newsbinator » Sat, May 09, 2020, 11:23 AM UTC

stormdennis wrote: post #95

ianmcgowan wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the same thing every time reading this otherwise-excellent post. I don't think we should attempt to erase history, but it is super jarring, at least for me. Was it ever actually funny?

Is there somewhere you can check what is or isn't funny?

There is, but the spec changes every 3 ~ 12 months, so you have to keep rechecking and going back to edit.

Re: Write Libraries, Not Frameworks

#196

Post by trboyden » Sat, May 09, 2020, 11:31 AM UTC

I found the blog post to be just another take on the micro-services vs monolithic application debate. Where micro-services = library and monolithic = framework. As a full-time coder I take a different approach - documentation is everything.

I could care less if a piece of code is a library, a framework, is made up of micro-services, or is monolithic. It all means diddly-squat if the documentation sucks and you can't figure out how to use the damn thing. It really doesn't matter if a big company sponsors the code either, because they usually have the worse documentation. Take the Mongoose Application Framework by Infor (https://mongoose.infor.com) which is supposed to be designed to help developers quickly build applications. The API has virtually no documentation. It has tons of libraries but you don't know what they do or what they are capable of unless you dig into the code to see what it does. They re-implement tons of standard .NET API with their own twist on it.

That experience changes the way I develop for fun. I have taken to do a lot my free-time coding with Python because the documentation, for the most part, is very well done. Most of the Python developers seem to take a documentation-first approach to their code which makes it easy to take on new concepts and branch out into different areas such as IoT or AI.

Re: Write Libraries, Not Frameworks

#197

Post by cageface » Sat, May 09, 2020, 11:37 AM UTC

skohan wrote: post #141

The more I program, the more I am convinced that owning flow of control is one of my primary jobs as a programmer. If I surrender this to a framework, there are a lot of decisions I can't make with regard to performance, and I have a lot less certainty about when and in what order exactly things are executed. There are of course some exceptions, but in general I want libraries to provide me simple, synchronous functi…

I’ve been working in some largish Rails codebases lately and this is exactly the problem I have. When I’m looking at a screenful of code I have no idea who is calling what, what’s in scope and from where, and what the shape of any of my data is.

In my opinion the productivity benefits of these kinds of frameworks evaporate and go negative pretty quickly once you move very far beyond what they provide out of the box.

Re: Write Libraries, Not Frameworks

#198

Post by BiteCode_dev » Sat, May 09, 2020, 11:38 AM UTC

Write free code, extract libraries, then organize some into frameworks.

We don't need to exclude any of those practice. In fact, focusing on only one of those is what leads to the most problems in my experience.

Re: Write Libraries, Not Frameworks

#199

Post by garethjrowlands » Sat, May 09, 2020, 11:43 AM UTC

jmchuster wrote: post #152

hyperpape wrote: post #33

I’m pretty sympathetic to this, as my experience with Spring has been “it’s convenient when it works, but awful to deal with when it’s not working”. However, I think to push this line of thought, it would help if we had examples of how to build significant applications without a framework. Ideally someone could provide a walkthrough of an app like that. Unfortunately I can’t volunteer myself: the last time I built wi…

I think Dropwizard is a great alternative to Spring. If you want to draw a spectrum between framework and "curated libraries + best practices", it's much closer to the latter. But then I guess that also depends on how much you consider the libraries it uses like guice and jndi to be "mini-frameworks". Ultimately, all that matters is how easy it makes your job, in both the best case and worst case scenarios, so I'll l…

Dropwizard was amazing when it came out and is still much better than deploying to Tomcat, say. But it's showing its age and I'd consider it too frameworky these days. My current currently preference is http4k, which is more library and less framework. Admittedly, that's Kotlin and thus not a fair comparison, but then, newer things can take advantage of other newer things.

Re: Write Libraries, Not Frameworks

#200

Post by edem » Sat, May 09, 2020, 11:50 AM UTC

oreally wrote: post #161

edem wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spring is not a good example. If you're a seasoned Java developer you look at an `AbstractDestinationResolvingMessageTemplate` and you just know what it does. I'm not kidding. Spring used to be a bad example yes, but not anymore. They really put the thought and work into fixing its design. Right now I can write an app __completely__ independent of Spring. In fact that's what I'm usually doing. You can do Clean Archit…

> If you're a seasoned Java developer you look at an `AbstractDestinationResolvingMessageTemplate` and you just know what it does. I'm not kidding. This claim is so bad. You could look at the name AbstractDestinationResolvingMessageTemplate and the useful information they would be gaining is that it's a message template. They would still not know how to use it; they'd still have to do an additional step like checking…

I didn't say that you would know how to use it. You don't need to know, the framework uses it. What I said is that you would know _what_ it is if you ever get an exception from that class.

I'm 95% sure that all those people complaining about Spring never read the reference documentation. I did, and whenever I bump into a problem I have an idea about how to solve it. Besides reading it only takes a few days and you're set for years.

Why do anybody expect to be able to work with a technology if they don't bother reading the documentation? This is like complaining about not being able to drive a car when you sit down in the seat without training.