It’s easy to hate on frameworks due to their secondary problems once you’ve lost sight of the original problems. If you stop using a framework, you are bound to recreate one probably shittier framework. Although I do agree premature abstraction is a bad idea you still need some
Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)
361–370 of 407 posts
Re: Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)
#362I remember following up the Angular tutorial. I was about 15min into the tutorial, and I was already editing 8 different files. I never got lost so quickly. I lost a job because I could not use angular, but never felt bad about it. I remember somebody commenting here on HN about a developer conference, where the speakers were bragging about their software being complex. This is an awful trend with software, and is re…
This is why React won: No template language to learn. No prescriptions for managing your app. No piles of abstractions to do basic things. It's just a UI lib. Import it, declare what to paint on-screen, done. Oh, you want routing? "Not my business", says React. Go add a routing library. You want a framework for managing global state? Go find one. Want a kitchen sink frontend solution which bundles all of these common…
> I can't imagine things being much simpler than this
Imagine simplifying the last example without useState and setState, nor useEffet and depList
Re: Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)
#363Customary "We didn't start the fire" for frameworks. (Apology to Billy Joel.)
Re: Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)
#364Earlier 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…
This is honestly part of the reason I abhor statements around "AI/ML will make software developers irrelevant in [insert catchy timeframe]"; the complexity in many (if not most) systems is not the coding. The interaction, the boundaries between systems, the agreements between them, and the subtle nuances among; this is where Things Get Hard.
Then there are the requirements gathering that lead us down this road. And the stakeholders that forgot important details. And that one team that has a hard production dependendency on an obscure DB table you only keep around because it simplifies a join somewhere.
Teach students of CS the latter, and they have a much greater opportunity to be successful.
Re: Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I’ve mostly worked in Microsoft shops. And I used to not like that. A lot of the guys around me adopted the attitude of, “what does Microsoft have that does that? “. As I’ve gotten older, I think that Microsoft has enough churn of their own. But it’s far less than opening up to the wild west that is GitHub entirely. I’m pretty grateful. Everything I work on is either C# or JavaScript. And I do like the abstractions a…
I work the same way now and I completely agree with you. MS stuff isn't perfect and if they don't provide what I need I generally find the most popular thing on Nuget or roll my own.
Meanwhile in JS land things are all over the place. My last team had multiple apps using all of the following and more: JQuery, Vue, AngularJS, React and Svelte. Design was done in Patternlab but had to be manually copied over and translated to cshtml and some parts were done in one of the aforementioned Js frameworks.
To me that was a nightmare. I think most stuff didn't need any JS frameworks at all, and trying to understand pages rendered partly in cshtml and partly in a Js framework is terrible, especially when they're all different.
Re: Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
Create react app, with all node_modules included, is well over 200MB of garbage OSS libraries. That’s insane for a hello world.
If “hello world” is the whole requirement behind an app, and you won't develop it further, you don't heed to use react. In fact, here's your whole app: “hello, world!”. Copy it, save it in .txt file, serve in static anywhere you want.
I wish more people would actually follow this advice. When they don't need anything "reactive" they would not use React. When they don't actually need an SPA, they would not use React. When they don't actually need dynamic behavior on a website, they would not use React or JS.
But unfortunately people use what they don't need all the time, rather following hype than reason.
Re: Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)
#367Earlier 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…
I think the simpler solution is to design the code around some kind of pdf generation library that is linked to, instead of making a heavily abstracted mini-framework to squat on the application.
Re: Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)
#368Earlier 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…
This misses the mark. CS classes and degrees are akin to reading books about swinging hammers rather than just swinging the hammer.
Depends on the university. My experience was that you spent more time then not having to swing, often in ways that would be applicable to actual carpeting rather than building wooden Monads nobody wants to use.
Re: Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This is honestly part of the reason I abhor statements around "AI/ML will make software developers irrelevant in [insert catchy timeframe]"; the complexity in many (if not most) systems is not the coding. The interaction, the boundaries between systems, the agreements between them, and the subtle nuances among; this is where Things Get Hard. Then there are the requirements gathering that lead us down this road. And t…
If LLMs keep improving at the current rate and get to the point where they can reduce hallucinating to a reasonable level, I don't see why they couldn't take on the challenge of abstract system architecture. It's still a problem that can be stated in natural language, which they keep getting better at 'understanding' (at least in the sense of giving more coherent answers).
Re: Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
The carpenter doesn't need a degree. The architect and structural engineer do. If you plan to be a programmer all your life, and a journey-man one at that, then feel free to learn-programming-in-21-days. If you're planning a career in software, then I think understanding fundamentals (database normalisation, the Order of a solution, the ideas of Coupling and Uncoupling, memory usage versus performance, the impact of…
You have such an idyllic view of the college environment. My experience was struggling to motivate my teammates to do anything beyond the minimum, and an endless barrage of "will this be on the exam?" questions during class. Looking back it's no wonder I am a self-learner now.
The best college course coding projects are the solo ones. I consider myself fortunate to have gone to a school where 95% of the code projects were solo (and about half of them were in C, too!).