Using a framework will harm the maintenance of your software • Hacker News Board

Re: Using a framework will harm the maintenance of your software

#321

Post by mightyRodri » Thu, Oct 13, 2022, 8:23 AM UTC

iveqy wrote: post #298

jarek83 wrote: post #243

It seems that there are mostly 2 types of devs: - those that use tools, learn them and master in them, - those that always want to create their own tools, and will usually oppose adopting and learning existing ones. I belong to the first type. I love frameworks because they give publicly available documentation that plenty of people contribute to - so my project will have access to all of it even if I'm gone. Another…

I belong to the second type. I believe it's a great asset to have in business. Most often less code means shorter development time and cheaper maintenance. People knowing a framework will often use it for everything. Instead looking at the problem and find the easiest solution to it offers great time to marked. I've proudly deleted more code than I've written at work.

> Instead looking at the problem and find the easiest solution to it offers great time to marked.

The easiest solution you can imagine. These are 90% of the time cute tricks that narrow down the scope of the solution so far it makes the surrounding code unmaintainable after a year.

I learned to call those people "Ricks" they are best used in walled of projects that are not expected to change. Not useable in cooperation.

Re: Using a framework will harm the maintenance of your software

#322

Post by ThePhysicist » Thu, Oct 13, 2022, 8:23 AM UTC

From my own experience, writing something without a framework often seems very elegant to yourself, but the moment you try to onboard other people to your framework-less code it becomes a nightmare. Turns out most folks don't want to get familiar with e.g. intrinsics of browser technologies, HTTP request processing or other complex things that you've reimplemented in your code, they just want to deliver working software using frameworks and conventions they know.

You can think of frameworks like conventions: If enough people know them, it makes life so much easier for everyone, even though the convention might not always be the best fit. To state an analogy, imagine each municipality would invent their own traffic signs from first principles - because it makes maintenance easier for them - and you were tasked to drive through such a city with large speed, learning the conventions as you go. An absolute nightmare. I think that's how most programmers feel about code that brings its own framework-less abstractions and technologies.

So while I would've been able to write my own frameworks I've become humble and reasonable enough to just default to something that's popular and well-known, because it will make life easier for my colleagues or employees.

Re: Using a framework will harm the maintenance of your software

#323

Post by edf13 » Thu, Oct 13, 2022, 8:23 AM UTC

No, it won’t

Re: Using a framework will harm the maintenance of your software

#324

Post by yardstick » Thu, Oct 13, 2022, 8:25 AM UTC

tpxl wrote: post #300

throwaway284962 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started using a framework for a task at work, was immediately tripped up by an obvious stupid bug in the config files, reported it and it was closed because "too many people already depend on this behaviour". So now I've in-sourced other companies legacy and taken on a huge liability in depending on the evolution of undefined number of other organisations and their code bases. And even worse when these frameworks a…

Good news, the framework is open source! You get to fork it, fix the bug and get every other functionality for free!

At which point it becomes an in-house framework, which is what they were trying to avoid I the first place.

Re: Using a framework will harm the maintenance of your software

#325

Post by planede » Thu, Oct 13, 2022, 8:28 AM UTC

piokoch wrote: post #265

throwaway0asd wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Every sufficiently complex framework-free application contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a framework. After 25 years of experience writing software I can honestly say I have encountered many people that agree with this, and perhaps all of them (every single one) have not actually experienced writing an application without a framework. This sentiment sounds correc…

Where do you draw the line between using and not using framework. Programming language is a framework over machine language. Java garbage collector is a wrapper around manual memory management. Java Servlets is a pretty thin wrapper over HTTP request/response, is this a framework already? How about Java JAX-RS, it is built on top of Java Servlets and built to handle mostly REST type requests. Same with database conne…

For me the most important defining characteristic of a framework is inversion of control. With a framework high level control flow is dictated by the framework itself. It follows from this that using two different frameworks can be challenging.

An abstraction layer over a database is not necessarily a framework, it can be just a library. I'm not familiar enough with specific ORMs to comment on those.

A programming language is interesting to look at from this point of view. While sure, you need to use the programming language's features to implement control flow, it typically doesn't actually dictate a high-level control flow itself. There are probably languages where this is not completely true.

Re: Using a framework will harm the maintenance of your software

#326

Post by reducesuffering » Thu, Oct 13, 2022, 8:28 AM UTC

naet wrote: post #71

Gigachad wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rails really does not scale. In performance or development. It’s still a great option for small sites though.

Off the top of my head, I think Github and Gitlab are both based on Rails, as well as Shopify and Airbnb. So there are for sure some very large companies that use Rails successfully at scale. I can't speak to how difficult it was to develop or deploy, and it seems like Ruby as a whole has lost some popularity, but Rails has worked and continues to work for a lot of organizations.

GitHub is moving away from Rails to Go now. So have Twitch, Twitter, Stripe, LinkedIn, etc.

Re: Using a framework will harm the maintenance of your software

#327

Post by soco » Thu, Oct 13, 2022, 8:32 AM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #235

jarek83 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of which you are the creator and expert, and have complete control and insight, and can change it in any way you want any time. It is in 100% alignment with your goals at all time. And then you change a job and you take 80% knowledge with you and your now-past project is in deep trouble.

If knowledge is on a single person alone, then your ex-company has bigger issues than framework or no framework. Not to mention that the interesting parts of your app should be the domain logic and workarounds and solutions used in it for business issues and historical layers of bussiness logic choices. And that a single person can take with them whether there's a framework or not.

I'm not sure why you would describe the entire real world as "problem". Because this is how the real world works, with organizations where the last knowledgeable guy was fired two years ago and now discovers they need to touch that incredibly useful and huge application he wrote ten years ago. I'm aware there's an entire book industry telling how the ideal world should look like but there are also unicorns in every fantasy book yet nobody would judge you for not herding a couple.

Re: Using a framework will harm the maintenance of your software

#328

Post by silversmith » Thu, Oct 13, 2022, 8:33 AM UTC

throwaway284962 wrote: post #225

a4isms wrote: post #17

1. Every sufficiently complex framework-free application contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a framework. 2. If you have a talented team, that half of a framework can be much better than using a one-size-fits-all framework that is popular because it used to be lean and mean with a small surface area, but has grown over time to do everything for everyone, becoming a com…

> 1. Every sufficiently complex framework-free application contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a framework. Of which you are the creator and expert, and have complete control and insight, and can change it in any way you want any time. It is in 100% alignment with your goals at all time. If you use a framework your organisation becomes incredibly complex, because you a…

You not only are in control, you HAVE to be in control. Nobody else will patch holes, optimise or deliver new interesting features. You're on hook for all of that.

Re: Using a framework will harm the maintenance of your software

#329

Post by m00x » Thu, Oct 13, 2022, 8:35 AM UTC

xnzakg wrote: post #267

m00x wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you should master your tools before using them. You can use frameworks where they fit, and not where they don't. Knowing when to do which takes time and experience, but it is definitely do-able, and better. Frameworks allow you to update, and maintain your app for free, since others will do it for you. If you do it yourself, you have to do all the work and that's keeping you from adding value elsewhere. To not…

> Frameworks allow you to update, and maintain your app for free, since others will do it for you. Usually not for free. Sooner or later there's an API breaking change and you end up spending time reading changelogs trying to figure out how to get your code working again...

Still way more work to do all of that yourself.

Re: Using a framework will harm the maintenance of your software

#330

Post by jgrpf » Thu, Oct 13, 2022, 8:36 AM UTC

m00x wrote: post #213

Test0129 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been burned by so many frameworks I am hesitant to use one unless the advantage is abundantly clear. Even something as mundane as an ORM can cause massive problems down the line if you're not careful, or you forgot to anticipate the case you need something more complicated than braindead CRUD. Frameworks force you into a paradigm. Yes, to spin up quicker, get new engineers onboarded quicker, etc a framework will…

> You're bound to their bugs If you do it yourself, you're bound to your own bugs. When they have bugs, it's fixed by a team of highly skilled contributors. Not using frameworks is just an ego problem, or a lack of skills.

I've had a couple of cases case where a bug was not fixed in time or fixed at all which results in writing workarounds or forking which is far from an ideal solution and further reduces the advantages of using a framework.