This is getting old.
Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)
61–70 of 407 posts
Re: Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone needs to learn to do calculus by hand before advancing to the calculator. People picking up frameworks without fundamental understanding is a shockingly common fallacy.
Wait, you're saying that calculators now do symbolic differentiation and integration (like sympy and mathematica)? Kids today...
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Re: Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)
#63I like the little joke at the very end.
Re: Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)
#64Look, if you don’t like React just say so.
Ok.
I don't like React.
Re: Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)
#65I don't get it. I assume the author is trying to make it sound absurd that you would need all these layers of factories to build a simple spice rack and, by analogy, that frameworks are also absurd. But if you were building spice racks at scale, of course you would build them in a factory! And you'd use machinery made in other factories. And those factories would have tools and machines made in yet other factories. T…
That's a mistake. Imagine you're instead a carpenter.
You're being called up because the problem is specialized.
Now as a carpenter, you go to the container store and then go back to your shop to dismantle prebuilt products and glue a bunch of different pieces from different containers together and present the Frankenstein cabinet as the product back to the customer. Also, you're on the hook for maintaining it.
Is it faster then just doing it yourself? Higher quality? Cheaper? Maybe...
Competency is the key skill here - someone could claim they're competent in both the NIH and framework way and they choose frameworks because of their vast power of assessments but statistically speaking, they're probably just choosing the frameworks because they lack the competency to DIY and are Dunning Krugering themselves.
A lot of this depends on the types of jobs you decide to take on. The boring ones are pretty easy to do with frameworks but the interesting ones are wildly unclear whether you're saving or wasting time by choosing one path over another especially if you're interested in the product's reliability and longevity.
The amalgamation of frameworks approach makes long term upgrading somewhere between very expensive and impossible. Dependencies, schemas, templating, test syntax can all change in totally incompatible ways as your version gets abandoned and you get locked in to whatever was hot 10 years ago. So much for security patches.
Eventually you'll end up forking the dependencies you once used to save you time and then patch them yourself - code ages way quicker with (most) frameworks.
Re: Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)
#66I'm not a huge fan of these pieces that don't speak to why frameworks are created in the first place. The counter point to this is that the purpose of frameworks is to turn O(N) problems into O(k) problems by implementing a seam in the code. The problem a framework ultimately solves is that some teams will choose to use screws, some will use a hammer and nails, some will use a nail gun, some will use glue, some will…
Related: "Write libraries, not frameworks," which goes more into depth about how frameworks establish precisely such a "seam" and the responsibilities it entails.
Re: Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)
#67I don't get it. I assume the author is trying to make it sound absurd that you would need all these layers of factories to build a simple spice rack and, by analogy, that frameworks are also absurd. But if you were building spice racks at scale, of course you would build them in a factory! And you'd use machinery made in other factories. And those factories would have tools and machines made in yet other factories. T…
The point that flew over your head is every one wants one spice rack. There is no scale, no one wants a 1km long spice rack or 10,000 small ones either. That you can just buy a ready made one is even more to the authors point. Most software shouldnt exist! Why even build a spice rack, indeed!
Re: Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)
#68I don't get it. I assume the author is trying to make it sound absurd that you would need all these layers of factories to build a simple spice rack and, by analogy, that frameworks are also absurd. But if you were building spice racks at scale, of course you would build them in a factory! And you'd use machinery made in other factories. And those factories would have tools and machines made in yet other factories. T…
By that very analogy, using frameworks for building a service is absurd.
A framework you would use in order to pump out a ton of services quickly, just like a factory in this case. They'd be similar, with similar functionality and such, but you can produce them quickly and upgrade things across all of them fast. They wouldn't by optimal, but time from development to launch would be quicker.
But most startups and companies start with one web service, where at that point you don't really need a framework. What you need instead is careful deliberation and implementation, together with development speed and also enough proper architecture to continue to facilitate development speed in the future, but not too much as to over-engineer things. A balance if you will.
But unless your business/startup is about pumping out 100s of websites, a framework will hardly help you achieve your goal faster.
Re: Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)
#69Simplicity is easy to mandate: "just use simple tools!". It's not always obvious when the finished product looks wonky and slanted and has to be retrofitted several times that the complexity was always there, in the world. The complexity in our tools is hopefully there to help with some complexity in the world. In my experience, it's always the junior who shouts "This could all be so much simpler!".
In my experience, it's always the junior who shouts "This could all be so much simpler!". Vis-a-vis the conversation that has ensued from this statement, I'll offer the suggestion that the real seniors are the ones who don't make blanket statements one way or the other, and appreciate the distinction between incidental complexity and intrinsic complexity. Some times, the problem itself is simply complex and requires…
In my experience, juniors almost never shout that. They are still living within the managed "website in 0 lines of code!" world the framework purports to provide.
And mids just think that's what the job is and nothing to do about it. It's not 1985 any more and 1985s tools aren't enough to write a cloud db backed ios app.
It's the seniors, and the good ones at all levels even if they aren't good at it yet, who object to complexity on a pure lack of elegance basis. They value elegant solutions and complexity is usually the ugly brute force solution that's merely complex when it's claiming to be sophisticated.
Even if they don't have any idea what to do differently, they just know that something surely can't be sensible just on the face of it. I would hope everyone at least gets the ancient "hello world by different levels of programmer" joke, and can see when it starts happening for real around them.
Re: Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)
#70I don't get it. I assume the author is trying to make it sound absurd that you would need all these layers of factories to build a simple spice rack and, by analogy, that frameworks are also absurd. But if you were building spice racks at scale, of course you would build them in a factory! And you'd use machinery made in other factories. And those factories would have tools and machines made in yet other factories. T…
Is the author trying to build themselves a spice rack or many spice racks for all the world? In one of those cases, yes, you would want a factory, but that isn't this case.
The same is true for code. Are you writing one application or are you writing the same application for many different customers? In one of those cases you would benefit from some sort of template but in the other case it all the extra stuff to scale just gets in the way.
If you want your one self-serving spice rack to scale then just plan ahead and make it bigger than your current needs so that you can add more spice later. Again, that also applies to code. If you want your one application to scale then just plan ahead. Jumping immediately into a framework only indicates you lack the confidence to make appropriate planning decisions.