Item — HN Reader

> On frameworks: "Why should we use computers like this, simultaneously building a house of cards and confining computing power to that which the programmer can fit in their head? Is there a way to hit reset on this view of software?"

I'm not entirely with him on the evils of frameworks. Software is built on software the way knowledge is built on knowledge. I'm happy to stand on the shoulders of giants. It means I don't have to rewrite what's already been well written (and well tested). There are tradeoffs, sure, and it's really important to understand the hows and whys of the frameworks you select (this is where open source really matters). Still, I think narrowing the problem scope so you can "execute the program you’re writing inside your head"—and inside the ambitious timeline of your startup—is the great gift of modern computing, not its curse.

1 comments

You're too kind.

Frameworks are the reason I can go and build a top class product in 6 months all on my own. If we didn't have them, each new product would require an army of programmers re-inventing wheels, and only big corporations with lots of money could afford to even attempt it.

Frameworks rock. Abstraction also rocks. Whenever I need something more than once, I make it abstract. I automate it, abstract it, make it re-usable. And 99% of the time - I am not kidding, it's really that high - I will re-use that piece of software, re-run that script, etc.

A senseless article, all in all.

Frameworks have a lot of issues. First of all, they tend to exclude each other, hence preventing you from reusing code that might be a better fit for a particular problem.

Second, they provide a perverse incentive to force every new application feature into the structure of the framework you decided to use at the beginning of the project.

Frameworks are like debt. They give us a head start at the cost of paying more down the road. Sometimes that head start is worth the higher overall cost and sometimes it's not.

I think libraries are a lot less problematic and still provide most of the benefits of frameworks.