Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)

factoryfactoryfactory.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 407 posts

Re: Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)

#291

Post by hutzlibu »

josephg wrote: post #286
hutzlibu wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Libraries and frameworks rarely tell you when they’re buggy messes." GitHub Issues usually gives you a good insight, into what problems exists and whether they get fixed, or not. (as a senior, you likely know, but others reading this, maybe not)

True, though figuring out community sentiment from GitHub issues is a bit tricky. The numbers alone certainly aren’t a good indication because projects attract a lot more issues when they’re popular.

Yes, you will have to read the issues. Some are just from people asking for support. Some are obscure issues. Some are genuine.

Re: Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)

#292

Post by sfn42 »

josephg wrote: post #281
adrianmsmith wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely right, there is definitely an optimal level of framework usage, for the reasons you state. I suppose what I meant was really excessive framework usage, the type of which is alluded to in the original article with the factory factory factories etc. I shall edit my comment to clarify that.

Yeah fair enough. The whole factory factory factory thing feels separate to me. I think of it as a disastrous, productivity destroying meme that spreads through words like “hidden implementation” and “one interface, multiple implementations”. You don’t to be a senior to be vulnerable to the mind virus, though once it gets into the heads of your senior engineers your whole team or company can be in peril. The disease…

Sounds like you haven't really understood the benefits of polymorphism, encapsulation etc.

The general idea is to compartmentalize your logic and only expose the important parts like if you need to generate pdfs from html you may need to use a lot of moving parts to make that happen but you hide all of it and only expose an interface with a single action that takes html and returns a pdf. If you later need to change how you do the pdf generation you can freely mess with the internals of the system any way you want because consumers have no dependencies on any of it. If you need to rewrite it from scratch you can implement the same interface and none of the code using it needs to change at all.

Re: Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)

#293

Post by tough »

josephg wrote: post #286
hutzlibu wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Libraries and frameworks rarely tell you when they’re buggy messes." GitHub Issues usually gives you a good insight, into what problems exists and whether they get fixed, or not. (as a senior, you likely know, but others reading this, maybe not)

True, though figuring out community sentiment from GitHub issues is a bit tricky. The numbers alone certainly aren’t a good indication because projects attract a lot more issues when they’re popular.

Well there's nothing worse than a dead Github with no issues/PR's, unless the software is complete and only bug fixing.

Re: Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)

#294

Post by tough »

weinzierl wrote: post #273
adrianmsmith wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But in the world of the factory factory factory, the apprentice carpenter (who really just wanted to drive a few nails) is now faced with trying to understand the gargantuan complexity of the factory factory factory. Sometimes I wonder if that's the point of all this complexity. (EDIT: I mean really excessive complexity as alluded to in the article with factory factory factories, or 100 microservices all in differe…

What you wrote matches my experience. Not that I approve of it, of course, but it is often like that. "The senior in the team is in charge of deciding what approach to use." The only thing I'd like to add is that the senior is rarely free in their decision. It is often an unspoken choice dictated by culture and upper management. (Ironically it's worse in companies with technically apt management.) You work in a Java…

Choose the tool you know is the best answer tho.

Re: Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)

#295

Post by tough »

bruce511 wrote: post #134
VoodooJuJu wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This misses the mark. CS classes and degrees are akin to reading books about swinging hammers rather than just swinging the hammer.

A lot of people think CS is "learning how to program in xyz." In fact programming is just a tool used to implement CS ideas and demonstrate their application in the real world. In my degree we spent maybe the first 6 weeks on actual learnjng-to-program (in turbo pascal.) Then another later on in Scheme. In 3nd year we did C, I don't recall what instruction we had there - maybe a week? Then 2 weeks in 3rd year where w…

As someone who hasn't learnt CS -the good way-

I'd wager that I'm interested in a niche of CS, mostly the internet, and websites, and apps and what not. So when I tried to learn C and code unix tools I just felt miserable tbh.

Science !== building

I agree langauge and syntax are just distractions from the -building- part.

In software engineering there's infinte hammers and you can build new hammers out of old hammers btw

Re: Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)

#296

Post by tough »

adamredwoods wrote: post #220
fma wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Life pro tip...don't enroll in a university where your CS degree is akin to reading books about swinging hammers rather than actual hammering.

I think the "hammer" metaphor is insufficient to cover why one would get a degree or not. I learned a number of fascinating things about computers in University that I would have never gotten on the job.

Couldn't you have learnt them on your own thanks to your own curiosity and outside of a job setting?

Re: Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)

#297

Post by monsieurbanana »

hutzlibu wrote: post #239
monsieurbanana wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But with high mobility nowdays, they seldom think it is worth it anymore. You teach and then they thank you and move on. You mean you tell them you will teach them, require them to have the skills to begin with anyways, work them like any other employee but with a fraction of the cost promising them full employment at the end, and at the end thank them and tell them to move on? (keeping the first person tone of you…

Yes, something like that. On the other hand young workers usualy greatly overestimate their impact on getting things done and the work required to check their work. (I know I was like that)

Yeah... That's not wrong.

On the other hand, those kind of "fake" internships are rampant here in France, specially with smaller companies or startups. From personal experience they don't bother checking their work. And how could they, the other employees are interns too.

Re: Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)

#298

Post by BlargMcLarg »

sfn42 wrote: post #292
josephg wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah fair enough. The whole factory factory factory thing feels separate to me. I think of it as a disastrous, productivity destroying meme that spreads through words like “hidden implementation” and “one interface, multiple implementations”. You don’t to be a senior to be vulnerable to the mind virus, though once it gets into the heads of your senior engineers your whole team or company can be in peril. The disease…

Sounds like you haven't really understood the benefits of polymorphism, encapsulation etc. The general idea is to compartmentalize your logic and only expose the important parts like if you need to generate pdfs from html you may need to use a lot of moving parts to make that happen but you hide all of it and only expose an interface with a single action that takes html and returns a pdf. If you later need to change…

Not everything needs a hyper-abstracted solution. Most people suck at writing neat abstractions, so they spend an excessive amount of time writing shoddy solutions which no one really wants to deal with but there's a soft, begrudging agreement to use them anyway while the business sees no value in having their devs rewrite it. This goes double when you step into the world of microservices, where you now have another layer where you can easily swap the implementation behind the interface.

Surely years of old Java shops with absolutely dreadful software architecture, sloppily copied from literature, showcase the path to hell being paved by good intentions.

Re: Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)

#299

Post by sfn42 »

Lio wrote: post #252
GuB-42 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the reason why CS classes and degrees exist. Or at least it should be. No company will pay you for several years just to learn complexity theory, write sorting algorithms, study schedulers, rewrite UNIX tools, understand hardware architectures, etc... They want you to be productive right away, and the shortest path is just to follow recipes with the latest framework. That's the point of education, universities…

I agree but it's not that you won't need these things but that you don't know when or if you'll need them. For a professional MBA that's taken over a department, it's not so much that they won't pay you to learn what's not definitely part of the job but that they can get away without doing so. It appear superficially to be the low risk option. It's the same reason that manufacturing gets outsourced instead of investe…

Man that is such a good point about outsourcing manufacturing. Damn.

Re: Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)

#300

Post by tough »

bruce511 wrote: post #262
59nadir wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say that the outcome is necessarily the same all the time, but the getting-nothing-of-any-value-done architect seems to be a common occurrence. We had one that by proxy stopped development on at least 3 projects I was supposed to be involved in because people wanted to make him part of the process, despite me having 10 or so years more experience and an evident track record of successfully greenfielding pr…

I think its good to separate function from title here. There are indeed good architects and bad architects - may you get the opportunity to work with the good ones. Personally I find that those who ultimately build the thing they architect are the best to work with. As the build they gain experience, they bridge the gap between theory and practice, and the feedback loop leads to better architecture and better code. B…

You're true, my best co-workers have been architects who also where tech-leads and great ICs

Your comment made me think how any full-time uni professor is -suspicious- of not interacting with the real world. Any -good- professor should be doing research or on the private sector half of his time to not be just a bookworm

Post reply on HN