Using a framework will harm the maintenance of your software

https://berk.es/2022/09/06/frameworks-harm-maintenance/

476 532 4 years ago

Before you comment with "So you want us to write everything ourselves?", make sure you read the paragraph that starts with "Many people will argue that not using a framework means write everything yourself. This is a false dichotomy."

akprasad• 4 years ago

Indeed. This excerpt from that paragraph is a good thesis for the essay as a whole:

The point is not to never use frameworks, but to isolate them. To call them from a single place. One that we own. That we are responsible for and that we limit very much in what it can touch.

OJFord2• 4 years ago

I think an easy example of that is what frustrates me the most in JS-land: everything has it's own CLI. Why? Quick start: `npm run nouveau-framework create@app 365 --with-voodoo`.

I don't want that. I want (maybe, at my discretion!) to add your framework as a dependency, read some API docs, and just start plugging it in where necessary.

But they all focus on greenfield projects, they all think the whole project is about/driven by them.

arinlen3• 4 years ago

> The point is not to never use frameworks, but to isolate them. To call them from a single place. One that we own. That we are responsible for and that we limit very much in what it can touch.

I had the misfortune of working on a project which abstracted a framework. It was awful. It ended up being an ad-hoc component that was half-façade, half-adapter that was inadvertently tightly-coupled with the framework. It added an awful lot of complexity with the only tradeoff being theoretically being able to abstract away the underlying framework.

It was not worth it. It created far more problems than those that it solved.

LAC-Tech3• 4 years ago

I feel like this response is common enough that it's almost a trope.

"Oh you don't like leaky abstraction X, so what we should all code in binary!?"

I think it comes from a kind of "Just World" spin off whereby all abstractions are considered pretty much equal, and it's cavalier to not code to the "highest" of these, no matter how many rickety chairs you've piled on top of each other to get that high.

Not all abstractions are created equal. As an example, choosing to use vanilla JS over react is not the same as hand-coding assembly instead of using C, Zig or Rust.

akiselev• 4 years ago

Not all abstractions are created equal.

I'd go so far as to extend the statistics aphorism about models to software abstractions: all abstractions are wrong (/leaky?), but some are useful for now.

The problem with software abstractions is that they, unlike the fundamental laws of physics, model code organization and business logic that frequently changes. These changes often make no sense beyond "VP lifer thought it was a good idea" so our house of cards is built on ever shifting sands. No abstraction short of a pointer can survive that.

randomsearch3• 4 years ago

If your argument is that using someone else’s abstractions is bad because you can write your own (which is what this article is saying), then the standard cliched reply is accurate. Cliches are cliches for a reason.

josephcsible• 4 years ago

The capital F in "Framework" everywhere made me expect at first that this had something to do with the eponymous brand of laptop.

flobosg• 4 years ago

This article is about software frameworks, by the way. The capitalization made me think it was about the Framework laptop.

emptyparadise• 4 years ago

Now I'm curious what sort of argument could be made about not using the Framework laptop.

vulcan01• 4 years ago

Easy to upgrade, so developers keep testing on the latest hardware and forget about older devices? Not sure how well this fits with the title.

ar_lan• 4 years ago

I thought the same exact thing, and had entered the article with a significant bias against the author based on the headline.

mhink• 4 years ago

The entire article uses some very odd grammatical conventions. The author is from the Netherlands, which I think might account for some of the oddness, but I can't tell if the capitalization is because of that or just because of the desire to be quirky.

Qwertious3• 4 years ago

I didn't enter with a bias, I was just thinking "LOL, how are they going to justify this, this is gonna be good."

And then they had to be something completely different and yet completely justified. Darn.

nrp• 4 years ago

My heart skipped a beat when opening HN today.

endorphine• 4 years ago

Same here and I started searching for a comment stating the same before I write my own.

cgh• 4 years ago

From the author’s About page: “I mostly work with Ruby on Rails. A professional, Open Source platform which powers enormous (e.g. Twitter.com) and tiny applications.”

LAC-Tech3• 4 years ago

Is your implication here that he's a hypocrite, or that he knows what he's talking about from experience?

shadowgovt• 4 years ago

Based on my own experience with Ruby on Rails, I'm ill-convinced that Rails experience gives you a good understanding of frameworks in general.

It can give you a solid respect for the dangers of letting a framework grow far beyond a simple focus.

djbusby• 4 years ago

Wait, Twitter is still RoR?

kayodelycaon2• 4 years ago

No. They haven’t been for a very long time. ~2008, iirc.

jvalencia• 4 years ago

No problem is new. You could use a facade pattern to decouple your framework. Though the extra step is often too tedious for most developers.

chrismeller• 4 years ago

The more isolation, the better maintainable.

I think sums up the entire thing. Nothing will necessarily harm anything, but…

If you make sure your framework and your app logic are sufficiently isolated then everyone is happy.

jmathai• 4 years ago

The post is promoting building applications in a loosely coupled but highly cohesive manner. It mentions using libraries when appropriate and not duplicating code.

I agree with this but it requires a lead who's good at architecting such a codebase. That person also needs to stay with the company for a long time because they're essentially replacing the "framework" with bespoke human logic.

I think many, maybe most, companies that try to build loosely coupled and highly cohesive code bases end up failing and it ends up being a mess.

Frameworks aren't perfect. But know what's less perfect? Humans. The really big frameworks try and take the human component out and replace it with codified conventions.

convolvatron• 4 years ago

because you are flawed, you should just give up on actually owning your software

arinlen3• 4 years ago

I think many, maybe most, companies that try to build loosely coupled and highly cohesive code bases end up failing and it ends up being a mess.

Companies who try to build any type of codebase end up with a mess. Always. No exception.

There is no reason to pretend software development's natural tendency to increase entropy is exclusive to a specific type of software architecture. In fact, some developers even go to the extent of criticising software architects for existing, because they have "rules" and enforce "order" and "organization".

If anything, being mindful of a specific architecture goes already a long way to fight entropy.

meesterdude3• 4 years ago

Companies who try to build any type of codebase end up with a mess. Always. No exception.

I love how demonstratively wrong this is

8n4vidtmkvmk5• 4 years ago

I'd rather wallow in my own mess than wade through someone else's though

Lio• 4 years ago

That maybe true but what happens when people, including yourself, switch teams?

At some point we all wade through someone else’s mess. Hell, even your own mess revisited after a period of time is unpleasant.

The more you can do to make your software predictable and boring the less unpleasant it will be for everyone.

soheil4• 4 years ago

The whole point is that there won't be a mess or at least as much of it if you use a framework. How is this so lost on people here so often!

hinkley7• 4 years ago

I would like to propose that if your organization has trouble making root cause analysis into usefully actionable information, that their codebase is also a mess. Because at the end of the day I think the same skills at looking at the interface of human and process are required for successful decomposition of logic to soften the interface between human and technology.

woranl2• 4 years ago

Frameworks come and go. What is trendy today will be deemed obsolete a few years later. By the time when the community no longer interested in said framework, it will feel like the rug got pulled leaving many projects stranded.

hocuspocus• 4 years ago

13 years into my professional career I'm still seeing Spring everywhere.

jamesfinlayson2• 4 years ago

Agreed - I think most programming language communities have settled on one major framework (though there are plenty of other smaller ones) and they've survived.

Spring: June 2003

Rails: August 2004

Django: July 2005

Symfony: October 2005

oreally• 4 years ago

Likely lockins.

Spring is bloated as hell, last I tried it took full minutes to startup a server on default settings. This kills iteration speeds for fresh projects.

P5fRxh5kUvp2th• 4 years ago

I'm not a java developer so I don't pay much attention to spring.

But I think the overarching point also includes versioning. For example, asp.net 1 app will still run today just fine, not so for many of these frameworks. RoR, Laravel, et al, all become a rat wheel of upgrading every 1-2 years.

It's a problem.

Contrast that with CakePHP which is still supporting CakePHP2 (I think, it's EoL is coming up soon though) over many many years. I do worry they're increasing their cadence and becoming like most other frameworks in this regard, so I may have to stop praising them for their attitude for support of older versions.

OJFord2• 4 years ago

It matches TFA, but I think 'Framework' in that capitalisation (incorrectly) implies it's about Framework (https://frame.work) the company.

I think quotes - 'framework' - would be better, both here and in the OP; we can fix one of those.

a4isms5• 4 years ago

I'm so old, I thought of the productivity suite from the 1980s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framework_(office_suite)

I still think about that suite, because it had a certain kind of elegance: Everything was frame, and therefore text documents and spreadsheets were frames, and you could embed a frame in a document, which correctly implies you could put a spreadsheet in a text document.

But the cells in a spreadsheet were frames, and therefore you could make a hierarchal spreadsheet, or put a text document in a spreadsheet's cells, and so on.

It had a "frames all the way down" philosophy that appealed to me, although the implementation was hobbled by the (to us) obvious limitations of the technology of its time.

From the wikipedia link:

The spreadsheet program was superior in its day, offering true 3D capability, where spreadsheets could form an outline which can be "opened" to reveal a separate spreadsheet, as well as other frame types — a feat of sheer convenient function never again seen and further enhanced in later versions.

Framework's built-in interpreter, the FRED (Frame Editor) computer language, was based on Lisp eval function. It can reference all frames and types across the product and can sense and perform all user interface operations.

rpdillon• 4 years ago

Thanks for this! I grew up writing school papers in Framework IV on a PC-clone 386. I still miss Framework from time to time, small wonder I became an Emacs user!

varnaud• 4 years ago

Even their website uses frames. https://framework.com/

heavyset_go• 4 years ago

I had the same misconception. Updating the title would fix the potential double meaning, in my opinion.

epgui2• 4 years ago

Am I the only one who thinks this is really hard to read?

berkes11• 4 years ago

In what sense? The design or contrast? Or the language used?

English isn't my first language, so I can imagine I could do better (I'm the author btw). If it's the design: I really need to tweak it a little further, but rather spend that time writing content than tweaking the blog itself :D

epgui2• 4 years ago

The grammar! Do you use something like Grammarly when writing?

I must say that anyone writing in a second language deserves high respect. English is my second language as well, so I know the struggle... Keep it up! You have good content here.

a4isms5• 4 years ago

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 complex monster.

3. If you have a small team that hires slowly, it's relatively straightforward to bring new devs up to speed on "the way we do things." if you are hiring rapidly and/or have a large team, the more bespoke things you have, the harder it is to maintain them.

4. Over time, everything degrades. In the long run, many framework-free applications either get walled off as "legacy" apps with new work done in separate services, or replaced outright. If it makes you money before that happens, you win. It is not necessary to try to design architecture that will last for centuries.

5. My last and--to me the most significant--observation is this: You want to pay the majority of your attention to the code that has the greatest impact on your desired outcomes.

Using libraries and frameworks is like a business outsourcing things that aren't its core competency and also aren't competitive differentiators. Most software shops do not win by having their own framework or by not having a framework, they win by using something bog-standard and saving their attention for the part of their code that "moves the needle."

But that's only "most," and your business may be one of the few.

tomcam• 4 years ago

Agree completely. I’d like to add a couple of things.

6. Frameworks often handle the last 20% of a project that no one wants to do, such as handling compatibility or accessibility issues.

7. There’s a good chance that the framework has already had to deal with edge cases that you would otherwise learn the hard way

forgotmypw172• 4 years ago

My experience is the exact opposite.

Frameworks have a very narrow compatibility and accessibility range, and to get the other (often more than) 20% requires extra hackery which has to be bolted onto the framework in ways that were not foreseen by the framework writers.

berkes11• 4 years ago

Both could be done with libraries.

Things that you (can) put away behind abstractions, layers or wrappers.

I'm the author and tried to convey clearly the difference between libraries and frameworks. Both allow code-reuse, both allow "standing on shoulders". But one allows you to do so with freedom of movement, independence and domain constraints (libraries) whereas the other locks you in, enforces architectures and designs and requires workarounds when your domain-requirements differ from what the framework dictates.

hsn9154• 4 years ago

Every sufficiently complex framework-free application contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a framework.

This is simply false.

On the other hand, every sufficiently complex framework-dependant application is way too complex for what it does, and would be a lot simpler if it was not using said framework.

My last and--to me the most significant--observation is this: You want to pay the majority of your attention to the code that has the greatest impact on your desired outcomes.

One of your greatest desires should be to have strong propietry technology that you control. Otherwise you are not different from anyone, and anyone can duplicate your work in two months by just using the same framework.

matthewmacleod• 4 years ago

No, it's not "simply false". It's something that many of us have repeatedly observed happening and probably done ourselves at some point. There are of course exceptions, but it's not really fair to bluntly dismiss it.

One of your greatest desires should be to have strong propietry technology that you control

Yes – and you should be investing your time in making that "strong proprietary technology" more effective, and spending as little time as possible doing all the bits that your competitors didn't have to do because they picked an off-the-shelf solution that did most of it to a "good enough" level.

zdragnar• 4 years ago

Avoiding the use of a framework does not preclude someone else from duplicating your work in two months by using a framework. It just means that you wasted a whole lot of time hand-rolling things that didn't need hand-rolling.

Most businesses are not successful by virtue of the technologies they choose. Facebook is probably the foremost example here; they started with PHP and moved over time to leverage additional technologies (some homegrown like hack and react, others just additional languages like C++).

There are plenty of facebook clones in plenty of languages. The technology isn't the reason Facebook hasn't been supplanted by a competitor with the exact same product.

couchand• 4 years ago

The author carefully distiguishes precisely what type of framework they mean. The definition includes multiple parts, but the part that really stands out to me is that a framework dictates the overall flow of control.

The suggestion in TFA is to ensure that you consume your dependencies in a decoupled fashion, a move toward utilizing libraries rather than following a framework.

I've spent lots of development time in highly-constrained environments that often feel more like a framework than a true platform. When given the opportunity, I'm inclined to follow the author's suggestion to keep dependencies decoupled. Even supposedly fundamental dependencies will eventually need to be swapped out, even if just for a v2. But your domain core should be making monotonic progress towards the distillation of your key concepts and relationships.

ensignavenger5• 4 years ago

The author uses Django as an example of a framework... but Django doesn't really fit the definition used.

Django does not dictate the flow of your code. It provides some libraries and there are common patterns, but Django is more or less just a set of Python modules you can import and use as you want (A bit of configuration is done for you if you follow common layouts, but you don't have to and can manually do the configuration).

What dictates program flow is when you use HTTP with Django (What its primary use case is) but that is dictated by the request/response nature of HTTP not by Django.

You can use as little or as much of Django as you want. Naturally, the more of it you use, the more it does for you.

hinkley7• 4 years ago

Commonly summarize simply as:

Libraries over frameworks.

If you chose not to use an existing framework and end up building your own instead, you just live long enough to become the villain of your own story, as it were. But it's really, really tempting to write frameworks.

Kiro• 4 years ago

TFA

That was uncalled for.

cbsmith4• 4 years ago

An RDBMS meets the definition.

_qyyd• 4 years ago

Do you think that formal specifications might alleviate logical bugs to an extent?

Yes, it appears that companies won't budget that at all. Many seem to ship fast, fix later. It is also on the customer, really.

Some people expecting software developers to deliver high quality software (with near 100 % code coverage and exceptional performance), but paying them less and less, is not fair. No wonder, some devs are incentivized to skip unit tests or error handling. Because some employer or some customer won't pay for it.

This is the status quo that makes me pessimistic. It appears that software development is gluing things together and make it somehow work.

This ain't fun for me.

ativzzz2• 4 years ago

I shudder to think about what a formal specification of some of the full stack web projects I've developed would look like. They might take longer than the actual coding of it - especially because specifications change mid project as we build things and realize we actually want them different.

Note this is a feature, not a bug, of "agile" development - you learn and adjust on the fly

cratermoon• 4 years ago

Using libraries and frameworks is like a business outsourcing things that aren't its core competency and also aren't competitive differentiators.

Adopting frameworks is a variation on the the Build vs Buy question, even when there's no money involved. Does the framework provide some features that are necessary for the technology but not core to what your business does? It's probably OK to use. A company that adopts a framework for its core business is essentially giving up any competitive edge, because any company that uses that same framework with the at least the same skill as your team will end up being a viable competitor.

wruza• 4 years ago

I agree with a sibling commenter after reading the article. The main point, as I see it between the lines, is not to refuse to use functionality (app side), but instead how this functionality should be packaged preferably (module side). Nothing prevents the one “in control” to give it up and expose a meaningful degree of it to a user, along with default mode convenience for those who want boxed version.

Frameworks actually add to a deplorable side of the software industry. They encapsulate truly great efforts and wisdom into a package which cannot be unwrapped and used partially. They are like smartest CPUs soldered into shitty boards (or simply incompatible with your requirements) without a chance to unsolder the functionality and use it elsewhere. You can’t make your own and you can’t take one off the shelf.

Consider this imaginary example: someone figured out all of the nuances of dom events across all browsers ever and made a clear api to it. Library way is to provide (Context, DomEvent) => MyEvent. Framework way is to create a complex rendering idiom in which MyEvent appears naturally and is an implementation detail. In the latter case you buy two for the price of two, and only so.

Or, they want to test a new idea/paradigm in some area. Without composable libraries, they are doomed to repeat all the mistakes you pointed out because to compete with already existing solutions they have to go all the way through issues unrelated to the idea itself. All that only to battle test it. For most library makers, the desired outcome is a sum of all parts, not just one.

tbrownaw6• 4 years ago

Frameworks actually add to a deplorable side of the software industry. They encapsulate truly great efforts and wisdom into a package which cannot be unwrapped and used partially.

Do you have a concrete non-hypothetical example? Because I don't think I've seen this.

throwaway0asd7• 4 years ago

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 correct in theory, but it isn't based on any experience from any one of the people making such a claim.

The reason why that is comes down to selection bias and cognitive conservatism. Once you become dependent upon a framework everything looks like a framework, even when it isn't. Therefore everything works as expected (like a framework) or it doesn't, which isn't buggy. So really this isn't a question of the software, but of the developer's capability to perceive (or not) that software.

This is why I refer to frameworks as an insane asylum as I described here to 27 up votes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32914694

inopinatus3• 4 years ago

perhaps all of them (every single one) have not actually experienced writing an application without a framework

I actually have written software without a framework, so by this standard I feel qualified to comment.

Not all software has an implied framework within it. Most Unix command-line utilities do not, for example, with only a few exceptions, and discounting the C standard library as something worthy of the label “framework”. Nevertheless even they exist within an overall architecture that starts to look like one, if you squint, and realise the enormous power of piping stdout around.

However, many line-of-business applications do develop sufficient complexity, as the owner/operator adds new features to support their expanding operations, that the subsequent edifice either accretes random code into a horrifying fatberg of unmaintainability, or some wiser developer refactors substantial parts of the interface, business logic, persistence, and runtime configuration, effectively creating a framework within that application on which the logic and interface and so forth subsequently hang, and with a pinch of skill and luck, in a fashion that is more readily reasoned about and amended.

Whether that informally-specified framework might be considered worthy of extraction into a unit of software for itself is another matter, and largely a case of programmer hubris.

johnfn• 4 years ago

This sentiment sounds correct in theory, but it isn't based on any experience from any one of the people making such a claim.

Do you really think that there isn't a single person who claims that frameworks are good who has never written an application without one?

Well, now you know me. I've tried writing a website without React, and I ended up writing a buggy half-implementation of React. (In my defense, I didn't really know of React at the time.) You only really have to do that sort of thing once before you learn that frameworks have some advantages.

tbrownaw6• 4 years ago

A framework is what happens when you write a ton of similar apps and factor out the common parts.

The quote here is no more literally true than the original lisp quote, but (just like the original) that doesn't stop it from being true in spirit.

scarface742• 4 years ago

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 correct in theory, but it isn't based on any experience from any one of the people making such a claim

I also have 25 years of experience and started my career writing C and FORTRAN on mainframes without any real library let alone a framework and then wrote my own libraries in C for my next job where I had to write cross platform code that ran on x86 based PCs and mainframes.

My next job, involved maintaining a proprietary compiler/IDE/VM for ruggedized Windows CE devices. So I think I have experience working without frameworks. Not to mention by the time I graduated from college in 1996 , I was a hobbyist assembly language programmer on 4 processors for 10 years (65C02, 68030, PPC 601, x86)

I can say that it’s the fifth level of hell coming behind an “architect’s” half assed framework who thought their problem was so special that they didn’t want to use a mainstream framework to handle non business specific concerns.

There have been a few times that I have ripped out my own code in favor of a popular library when I discovered it.

pmontra3• 4 years ago

Sometimes I stated writing a web app with Sinatra, which is about the less frameworkish thing you can do in Ruby unless you are also writing your own router.

I regularly end up having to

1. Either write my own code to query the db and build Ruby objects from the response and viceversa OR use ActiveRecord.

2. Same thing about managing the database schema. Either my own code or someone else's. So why not Rails' well tested one?

3. Organize the code base in some way that makes sense.

4. Write my own code to manage tests OR use rspec / capibara (OK, they are not part of a framework but they are a large dependency)

In the end I always regret I didn't use Rails from the beginning because I end up spending a lot of time doing useless takes. Keep in mind that I do that for my own projects in my free time. 99% of the times my customers decide what to use (Rails, Django, Phoenix.)

m00x4• 4 years ago

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 use frameworks these days would be objectively stupid unless you're working on extremely low-level things.

piokoch• 4 years ago

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 connectivity. Where framework starts? On JDBC/ODBC driver layer? ORM mapper like iBatis? JPA/Hibernate "true" ORM with automatic dirty checking?

matharmin• 4 years ago

In my current job, I have written a small framework. It's very limited in scope and hasn't changed much since the initial implementation, so it works fairly well. But, there is a big issue with getting other team members to understand how to use it. That alone is enough that we're replacing it soon.

Another team member has developed frameworks for both infrastructure management and creating services exposed over http. Here there is a large value in using the same internal tooling over 20+ projects. But once again, being an internal-only tool means that the documentation is severely lacking, and often we need new features in the frameworks. All of that is essentially blocking on the single team member. In this case we're keeping the frameworks, but it definitely has its caveats.

treeman79• 4 years ago

I’ve written without a framework several times. Pretty soon realize I’m spending my time writing up a framework.

I’ve inherited non framework projects many times. They take way more time to get up to speed on.

Now I’ve seen framework projects where they clearly didn’t try and work with it. Those ones just make me sad.

RunSet2• 4 years ago

I think of frameworks as running with crutches or cycling with training wheels. People interview potential couriers, look them in the eye, and ask: "DO you run with crutches?"

Not "CAN you run with crutches?" (as anyone who can run without crutches can run with them) but DO you run with crutches, as though running without crutches might signify a lack of ability. Fine time to unask the question.

schwartzworld2• 4 years ago

have not actually experienced writing an application without a framework

There are a lot of different types of organizations, and their needs for development vary. Using well known tools reduces onboarding time, and in a large organization with turnover, that's not an insignificant cost. You really think the documentation you wrote for your app is better than those of a popular open source framework?

Frameworks also bring community defined best practices and standards. There is support from tooling like test frameworks that make functional / unit testing easy, linting and code formatting tools, IDE support, autocomplete snippets, debugging tools, browser extensions. These things might not be important in a small team, but with 100 devs, they bring real benefits.

I just put all my state data in one object, save it on each user interaction

The saying is any "sufficiently complex app", and your approach to state management speaks volumes about the scale and type of front end apps that you work on. If you've never had bugs in your state using this strategy, it's wonderful. But if there were 100 of you constantly adding to and changing this global object, do really think that would be manageable?

How much state are you dumping in this object? If you only reference it on page refresh, your app must not be very reactive. One UI component could have quite a bit of state associated with it. One complex dashboard SPA could have hundreds of different pieces of state that are being tracked. Modern frameworks are tackling that problem, and the fact that you don't have it doesn't mean nobody else does.

jameshart3• 4 years ago

Any time a piece of software abstracts a repeatable pattern, that’s a ‘framework’.

All a framework means is that there is a coherent, repeatable model for implementing the building blocks out of which the application is built.

Even a simple command line program with hardly any functionality soon runs into the issue of having more than one command-line argument or environment-variable based configs. And a sensible, maintainable approach to this involves someone spotting ‘hey! We can abstract the bits that all our command-line parameters have in common so processing them all is consistent’. And then you have a framework. Because now ‘adding a new command line parameter’ has to be done in the standard way - you register a validator here and you add a help string there.

Building something without a framework is a rejection of patterns, or of the value of establishing repeatable structure.

Software that facilitates encapsulating chunks of functionality as standard building blocks is more maintainable over time. It’s much easier to work on a system where you can take a user story and interpret it as ‘okay, so we can implement that as a new Task type and then add a Tool to the Tool Library that lets users who have the right Role create a Schedule to run the task’. any time a system is sufficiently structured that you can think that way, it’s essentially become a framework.

Frameworks can be lightweight or heavyweight, sure, and they can be open to being overstepped or closed - and choosing when to prefer to structure your framework to make it easier or harder for someone to step outside the lines is just an engineering choice like any other.

mattgreenrocks• 4 years ago

So really this isn't a question of the software, but of the developer's capability to perceive (or not) that software.

It is quite telling of HN's audience if they honestly think that "every sufficiently complex framework-free application contains a [buggy] half-framework." The precise definition of a framework may be a bit hard to pin down, but most any experienced practitioner knows it when they see it. Things I look for:

* coupling of a blessed architecture, libraries, and patterns. Some choice of libraries may be allowed, but they must conform to a framework-prescribed interface.

* difficulty of isolating behavior for fast unit testing when using framework as prescribed (not always, but this is right more often than I want still)

* inversion of control as a core building block instead of straightforward composition. (This point gets fuzzier in callback-centric langs.)

* main() (or its moral equivalent) ends up being a framework bootstrap call, or is hidden entirely.

* related to last points: emphasis on hiding as many execution details as possible to present a simplified view of what the framework author believes is important.

* reliance on extension points to customize behavior (via subclassing/hooks) rather than simply exposing primitive operations that users can call alongside custom code.

* documentation beyond API docs and tutorials, usually necessitated by the number of novel concepts introduced by the framework

* heavier-than-normal emphasis on marketing, often leading with social proof from a megacorp, sometimes with big promises on how this framework is not like the others

The main takeaway should be this: a framework is not something that wants to blend into the background of your application. It is extremely visible and it is something that you program to, and often must take what it wants into account when designing. Without a framework, you can literally do whatever you want, including making a huge mess, or something small, functional and minimal.

I believe that should disqualify most of the rather absurd claims that all libraries/patterns/libc are "frameworks."

ChrisMarshallNY3• 4 years ago

This sentiment sounds correct in theory, but it isn't based on any experience from any one of the people making such a claim.

I've written a number of frameworks, plugins, and extensions, and refactored existing ones. I've used a number of them. I tend to customize stuff, which isn't always conducive to using "heavy" frameworks. I've enjoyed "bald" ones. Done some big stuff.

Some came out great ... some ... not so great.

The "not so great" stuff tended to be early in my career. Refactoring existing ones, helped me to learn how to do it right.

I think the first one that I refactored, was PHP Nuke. It emitted terrible HTML, and my refactoring made sure the output would validate (and WAG the dog, so to speak). I ended up binning it, when they did their first upgrade. Learned a harsh lesson, there.

I wrote a framework in Perl. That was ... challenging.

These days, I tend to use a lot of modules and connectors, and use whatever framework is built into the OS (I write native Swift). I've heard great things about Laravel, but I have never used it.

taylodl• 4 years ago

I've been creating software for 40 years and I can tell you the statement "every sufficiently complex framework-free application contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a framework." is 100% accurate. Back in the day we'd go and create our own frameworks that we could use on multiple projects. They were never as robust as the frameworks that exist today since we didn't have nearly the number of people using the framework and discovering issues. Not to mention the incredible amount of time we spent creating and maintaining these frameworks. Coming from that experience early on in my career to where we are today with people complaining about "too many frameworks" sounds like first world whining to me! :) I'll take too many frameworks over having to create everything from scratch any day.

garyrob• 4 years ago

"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 correct in theory, but it isn't based on any experience from any one of the people making such a claim."

Twice, I made the mistake of programming my own data frameworks so that I wouldn't have to rely on pre-existing databases. Total mistake both times. I have learned my lesson. (Most people wouldn't even think of doing that now; but I've been a pro since the 80's. The situation with web frameworks now is analogous in many ways to the situation with databases long ago.)

quickthrower23• 4 years ago

The adhoc framework will also be half known to 5% the current team and barely known outside of happy path use cases to the rest. If you find a bug with the adhoc framework you need to convince a busy person in another team to spend time to unblock you. Or chuck in another hack and move the ticket to done and walk away slowly with stretched out arms.

throwaway2849624• 4 years ago

If you find a bug with the adhoc framework you need to convince a busy person in another team to spend time to unblock you.

Which is not so difficult, because that busy person is in the same organisation as you, and therefor working towards the same goal.

Fixing that bug is much more difficult if that person is in an outside organisation, serving many other customers on the same code base (with possible conflicting needs), and/or is not actually in any way accountable for it (open source).

resonious2• 4 years ago

This is good and I pretty much agree. One thing though is that I think #1 and #4 actually also apply to framework'd applications. In my experience, even apps built on Rails end up with a business logic-level "framework" that is ad hoc and not obvious to newcomers, which results in bugs.

Not to mention, the frameworks tend to be hard to use "correctly". Rails devs will have heard the term "the Rails way". In fact this article has an awesome example. There's a snippet of code of a controller checking to see if a User exists with the given email. Any Rails veteran would know that you can just call `User.create` in the controller and rely on validations for that kind of check. But that's another problem with frameworks - you have to know the whole thing in order to use it well.

Daishiman2• 4 years ago

But that's another problem with frameworks - you have to know the whole thing in order to use it well.

This applies to whatever in-house monstrosities get built too, except that without docs or a million eyeballs to judge whether a workflow makes some sense to an outsider.

scarface742• 4 years ago

But that's another problem with frameworks - you have to know the whole thing in order to use it well.

The difference is I have plenty of resources at my disposal to learn how to use a popular framework. I only have hopefully the one “architect” who thought their problem was a special snowflake to ask about their framework - if they are still at the company.

flomo• 4 years ago

That has long been one of my complaints about Rails. It creates a nice directory structure for the framework's objects. But there's no obvious place by default to put business/application "your logic". So then all that stuff gets wedged into huge controller and model files. (in the old days there was a division between 'business objects' vs 'data objects' etc)

#1 is definitely true. I had my own halfassed 'framework', and have dug into enough older web apps to know that everyone else had one too. (Or at least the smart ones did.)

sbf5014• 4 years ago

I think this argument is about free vs. not-free frameworks. Frameworks that are supported by a company and actively developed are far superior to the state of NPM open source right now (thinking of Qt vs Electron and my 7 year battle with both).

It is no fun when an open-source framework pushes a new major version, then deprecates the version you were on, or dependencies fail to find matching version, and you beg github developers to fix the bug and your issue sits open for months and is then closed with no warning.

DrewADesign2• 4 years ago

I think some of your experiences can be explained by your citing NPM as representative of FOSS. Not that there's anything wrong with the astonishing breadth of functionality available in the NPM ecosystem, but stability isn't its strongest comparative suit. OTOH, Django, which was cited by the author, just doesn't have that kind of volatility in its base features.

holri2• 4 years ago

And it is no fun when the manager of the company developing your proprietary framework decides to tank it because of a change in strategy or the competitor buys the company and stops development. Since you have no source code you are forced to do what the commercial interest of foreigners dictate.

eyelidlessness2• 4 years ago

Every sufficiently complex framework-free application contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a framework.

Or three or twelve of them.

eyelidlessness2• 4 years ago

I want to credit both the reference (it’s about lisps) and my frame of reference (there are at least a couple of should-be lisps in projects I maintain, and at least one more I think would benefit from a going concern that seldom gets recognized as lispy but absolutely is).

Test01294• 4 years ago

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 do the job. But it's not a free lunch. In exchange for this you are hopelessly intertwined in the author's idea of what makes something good. You're bound to their bugs, you're bound to the nuance, and most importantly you're developing knowledge of a framework, and not what the framework does. Some major frameworks, for example React, might pass the smell test as "just use it". This is the exception and not the rule mostly guided by the fact that Javascript is the absolute hottest garbage to ever grace our unfortunate field.

For some people this exchange is worth it. I'd generally recommend a company use pieces of a framework where they can. But to use a whole framework? Let's put it this way, early in my career I was involved in more old rails projects than I care to admit that were FILLED with kludges because no one could justify actually doing it right and in-housing most of it. I've been involved in projects that were hopeless dependent on the ORM-du-jour that were completely hamstrung because the ORM didn't take full advantage of the query planner, or lacked the necessary constructs for complicated queries, etc. ORMs are the worst, in my opinion, because the only other option is to then _force_ the ORM to do what you would've done originally (defeating it's purpose). General purpose web frameworks are close runners up (and related).

Your 5 points are nice sounding, and you probably get a lot of CTOs and engineering directors to agree with you. However, as a man in the trenches I can't say anything but you're fortunate to never have been on something complicated enough that a framework hamstrings you. Rescuing a project from a decision made by some framework-first shortsighted genius is the reason we get paid as much as we do.

Beltalowda• 4 years ago

I mostly agree with this, and also with the parent poster. I've seen framework become a big problem, and I've seen shitty ad-hoc frameworks for "framework-less" applications.

I've had fairly good success with what I like to call "framework libraries". That is, all or most of the functionality of a framework, but composed more as a library (or rather, a set of libraries) than a framework, giving you the best of both, mostly. ORMs are often given as an example, but I rarely found them as issue as most I've used have an "escape" to allow you to just use SQL if need be. The bigger problems with frameworks are when you want to compose some application in a way the framework doesn't really like (this can be a problem in Rails, for example).

I aggressively push things to libraries whenever I work on something; sometimes they can be made public, sometimes not, but even when private it helps a lot in mentality of people, especially with certain kind of devs.

m00x4• 4 years ago

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.

kodah• 4 years ago

Some counterpoints and personal experience:

3. If you have a small team that hires slowly, it's relatively straightforward to bring new devs up to speed on "the way we do things." if you are hiring rapidly and/or have a large team, the more bespoke things you have, the harder it is to maintain them.

I disagree that framework or no-framework is the distinguishing characteristic. I do think that the quality of the code base, documentation, and onboarding plays a role in how fast devs get onboarded. Anecdotally, the only framework-based projects I've signed on to ended up incurring more onboarding time because I had to learn the framework, how the framework does things, and then how the team does things in the framework. All of this "how" is a step before "why", of which, every step eventually needs to be repeated over the course of my tenure in order to be successful.

4. Over time, everything degrades. In the long run, many framework-free applications either get walled off as "legacy" apps with new work done in separate services, or replaced outright. If it makes you money before that happens, you win. It is not necessary to try to design architecture that will last for centuries.

I've personally never seen this in any language except Java. Spring might as well be Java at many companies. The bespoke applications stay around, in my experience, because:

- They exactly match the business requirement and that requirement doesn't change much

- People don't know how to work on them or the product has little funding, probably because of the above reason

- The company has hired a team to maintain the product that have not moved

I've also seen where companies try to replace something bespoke with something written in a framework where the budget expands multiple years in a row and the project never completes because it's impossible to make the framework do what the bespoke product did completely.

5. My last and--to me the most significant--observation is this: You want to pay the majority of your attention to the code that has the greatest impact on your desired outcomes.

To me, this reads as, "we should spend the majority of the time focusing on our core competencies". I've heard this time and time again in this industry and no matter what way I've heard it explained I've never liked it. Businesses that only stay in their core competency, or narrowly define their competency, often stagnate with time. There's a lot less opportunity for organic business growth with that mindset. They'll also have little expertise to solve problems as they scale, other than through purchasing, because they only have knowledge that serves their core competency. The businesses I've seen become most successful alongside strong technical success were businesses that encouraged employees to innovate and experiment in new ways on a rhythm, allowing that innovation to inspire and percolate when it finds a strong usecase.

a4isms5• 4 years ago

Anecdotally, the only framework-based projects I've signed on to ended up incurring more onboarding time because I had to learn the framework, how the framework does things, and then how the team does things in the framework. All of this "how" is a step before "why", of which, every step eventually needs to be repeated over the course of my tenure in order to be successful.

This is one of the most interesting replies, thank you.

The pitch for a lot of tools—be they frameworks, libraries, languages, &c.—is that if they’re popular, you get to hire people who arrive already knowing the basics of how things are done.

The reality is that popularity waxes and wanes, so when people are evaluating a tool’s fitness for purpose, they sometimes have to read tea leaves to decide if it’ll pay off or not.

A company making several such wrong bets in a row often has a trail of poorly supported ancient technologies lurking around. They still work—Joel Spolsky famously said that code doesn’t rust—but it’s aggravating to onboard, there are few productivity advantages, and sometimes the same thing is done three different ways because the company made two “wrong” bets before making the bet they currently think is “right.”

Would things be better had they just done their own thing and stuck to it? Possibly, I tried above NOT to make a claim that a popular framework is either the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do.

But it is good to read your comment pointing out that sometimes, a popular framework isn’t popular enough to harvest the benefits for people onboarding.

8n4vidtmkvmk5• 4 years ago

bug ridden mess maybe, but probably not slow. with 0 overhead, things to be fast by default. frameworks add weight.

cies2• 4 years ago

frameworks add weight.

Not really true. Sure they add some, but the alternative (libraries) also add weight. So the question should be: do FWs add more weight than using libs directly.

There are some FWs in Rust where the weight is very minimal. That said the FWs are also very minimal.

gernb• 4 years ago

4. Over time, everything degrades. In the long run, many framework-free applications either get walled off as "legacy" apps with new work done in separate services, or replaced outright. If it makes you money before that happens, you win. It is not necessary to try to design architecture that will last for centuries

not sure what framework-free has to do with. I'd remove the word "framework-free" and it would still be just as true

goodpoint3• 4 years ago

1. Every sufficiently complex framework-free application contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a framework

Yet a nicely designed, simple, custom half-framework is cheaper to maintain than a bloated popular framework.

throwaway2903• 4 years ago

Unless your half-framework has equivalently good documentation as a popular framework (which hardly ever happens), this thesis break apart as soon as someone who didn't implement your in-house creation needs to maintain your project and fix your bugs.

throwaway2849624• 4 years ago

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 are now actually competing against the needs of other companies, your competitors, which are also influencing the framework.

Your software is custom made for your organisation, it's not mass producing identical systems on an assembly line, so it doesn't make sense to share a common platform like you do with cars. And even if you did, this platform would be a joint venture, and absolutely not made by a subcontractor, and no way in hell some random unpredictable volunteering hobby organisation.

jarek834• 4 years ago

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.

dagw• 4 years ago

Of which you are the creator and expert

No, I'm not. The guy who quit 2 years ago was. I've worked with custom frameworks, and while they where both clever and powerful with some quite cool features which would have been tricky to do in a more generic framework, they where also virtually undocumented, fragile, difficult to extend and slow to get people up to speed on.

randomsearch3• 4 years ago

That’s why I always start a new app by writing my own operating system for it first.

Use frameworks, use libraries. They will save you time, make your code less buggy, make it easier to hire other people.

Writing your own ball of mud is great for a hobby but not for business.

dstick• 4 years ago

Speaking purely about web software / web APIs, most software is 90% CRUD. It absolutely makes sense to use a framework to save new hires from grokking 90% of it's capabilities. You can have a new developer do stuff right out of the gate.

silversmith• 4 years ago

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.

camgunz10• 4 years ago

This is one of my hobby horses! I'm disclaiming my bias upfront so I can try and have empathy for your position, but I strongly disagree with this line of thinking. I've been thinking a lot about this personally, and I think I would summarize my argument as "a lot of engineers think they're building beautiful, bespoke palaces, but in truth they're building regular houses, which is actually more important in the macro, but should be boring in the micro".

I broadly agree with GP here, but to round out some of their points:

- Frameworks take care of the parts of your application that aren't special. In the same way garbage collection isn't the value your company provides to customers, HTTP header parsing (or whatever) isn't either.

- Frameworks prevent your team from diving down architecture rabbit holes, or having to read a bunch of books on DDD, or what have you. This sounds like a small point, but if you tracked the number of expensive engineering hours spent disagreeing about where code should go, look like, and work, you would realize it's a pretty big one.

- Frameworks are tested way better than you ever could by thousands of users, actually documented, contain compatibility guarantees, and have security policies. To match this quality, your company would probably spend millions of dollars on eng hours. That's why company-specific frameworks don't match this quality.

- Frameworks make onboarding way easier. Most Python engineers know Django; most Ruby engineers know Rails. By definition, you can't hire engineers that already know your framework (even if you use something like Hexagonal, because no two implementations of this are alike). And again, because your in-house framework will be poorly tested/documented/etc., new hires will struggle. They'll also wonder if this is a career cul-de-sac: "I have 4 years of irrelevant experience in [bespoke framework X]" is not an enticing resume bullet.

Your software is custom made for your organisation, it's not mass producing identical systems on an assembly line

This returns us to the palace vs. suburbs framing. The software you write is a super small percentage of the code that runs your app, all the way from firmware to CSS libraries. Good engineering is carefully deciding what code you will write yourself, because code isn't just implementation, it's design, buy-in, maintenance, documentation, and liability. Some enterprises are replacing a big chunk of that stack (Oxide or Cloudflare come to mind), but I bet 95% of companies are just building REST/GraphQL servers. That's not special enough to require a custom, in-house framework. You should just build the house the regular way.

coldtea6• 4 years ago

1. Every sufficiently complex framework-free application contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a framework

Every sufficiently complex built-on-top-of-a-framework application contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of workarounds to the framework's limitations, the overhead of parts it doesn't need, a nightmarish dependency situation, and as a cherry on top, it ends up based on a previous version, of the framework (as the latter's creators rewrite with different APIs every couple of years for no good reason).

dmitriid• 4 years ago

Why not both? :)

Often you end up with an external framework, and an internal framework, and workarounds for both of them.... that are trying to evolve into their own framework

cjfd• 4 years ago

For a "sufficiently complex application" it is more likely than not that the framework of which half was implemented in an "ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow" way actually is not available anywhere. Instead, very likely, some random framework that sounded like its functionality is somewhere in the direction of what is needed was downloaded and now partially helps and partially hinders development. Probably it hinders more than helps. But this assumes "sufficiently complex application". For a simple application it is more likely that a helpful framework is available.

kybernetyk• 4 years ago

Re point 1: yes. But it’s your bug ridden half framework and you don’t depend on external developers to make sane decisions.

I’ve been using static site generators for my product site and app documentation and every time I set up a new dev machine e (or just update the generator) I’m in dependency hell because some plugins had breaking changes etc. that’s why I switched to my own bug ridden php implementation of the site/docs. At least I don’t get to spend the day googling for change logs, etc when I type ‘make’.

/rant over

ihateolives• 4 years ago

PHP is a bit of a special case here. I returned to PHP after 10+ years of hiatus and was surprised how easy it is to get shit done for the web, I had forgotten all about it.

dustedcodes• 4 years ago

Software is a layer cake and in my opinion from 20 years software development experience I firmly believe that the top 1-2 layers of your business application should not rely on some framework if you want to create a great product, stand out amongst competitors and have a technological advantage in terms of innovation and maintenance. Whatever happens at the top 1-2 layers is what your business cares about the most and what defines your business and you want to have 100% control to fine tune it. I've worked in many companies and on many projects and this made a difference every time.

zelphirkalt• 4 years ago

I would add though, that if the framework consumes much of the attention of the developers, then it is still a loss.

And I would add to the title, that using a overly _hyped_ framework will harm the maintenance. Using some framework, simply because it is new or hyped, that will get teams and companies in trouble.

Fire-Dragon-DoL• 4 years ago

Something I keep observing that seems to be passed over, coming from a Rails background, is that by using a known framework, the company is also accepting the "population" that comes with it, as well as the known problems.

I observed many Rails developers and many apps (purely anecdotal, I wish I could run a real study), but the problems are the usual, the ones on top of my mind right now:

    - database changes affect directly UI code, so a change in the DB requires changing code in a million places
    - Rails devs don't know SQL as much as they should (often just don't know it), for a framework that so SQL-centered, it's weird
    - hidden logic (callbacks)

These are very common problems with this framework and are well known to hinder company growth and ability to iterate.

Would a home-grown framework be better? I cannot tell, but surely if the list of downsides when choosing a framework was written in the splash page, I would be way more scared. "If you use this framework, your db will 100% be coupled with your frontend" is a terrifying statement.

Given that, framework should be evaluated for their downsides too, but there isn't even a list of known issues.

a4isms5• 4 years ago

100% worthy observation from my career experience.

Choice of a framework both attracts a certain type/subculture, and repels another.

Example: You have an old app that uses Backbone+CoffeeScript for the front end. If you stick with that, it will absolutely impact your hiring. But what about switching?

If you pick React, that will have one impact. If you pick Ember, that will have a different impact. And so forth…

mbrodersen• 4 years ago

Not my experience at all. The fewer frameworks I use, the more solid and reliable the software tends to be. And you avoid the yearly “our current framework is crab so let’s try something else” rewrite that everybody else seems to be involved in.

ZikPhil• 4 years ago

I think his website could use a framework and some off-the-shelf templates to make it easier to read :)

junon2• 4 years ago

Discrediting the article with blanket statements and criticizing the format of the site are both against HN guidelines which you can review at the bottom of this page.

meesterdude3• 4 years ago

nonsense. This is relevant to the authors thesis: If frameworks are bad and everything should be done manually or in a decoupled way - the quality of the work product of the author, should be subject to discussion. Are they hand weaving beautiful prose? or deluding themselves that they can do a better job?

I find it highlights a key discrepancy: if the author had relied on a framework for this, the quality could be far greater at less effort.

chris_wot• 4 years ago

Seems on point to me.

knodi• 4 years ago

Without a framework whats the alternative? Roll your own everything...?

junon2• 4 years ago

Did you read the article?

Ma8ee7• 4 years ago

Libraries.

kazinator• 4 years ago

a software framework is an abstraction in which software, providing generic functionality, can be selectively changed by additional user-written code, thus providing application-specific software. [..] Frameworks have key distinguishing features that separate them from normal libraries:

You mean, whereas you call a library; a framework calls you? :)

tabtab• 4 years ago

We wouldn't need bloated convoluted web & JavaScript frameworks if we had a state-ful GUI markup standard. Then any language that can emit and read XML can use the GUI kit/browser/component, no binders needed. At least in the domain of custom business and administrative CRUD, the end users really want a web-enabled GUI application, as most work is still done on desktops. ("Desktop first" works better for typical biz than "mobile first".)

Somebody criticized the idea saying that one would end up writing their own wrappers for such a language, but that's not a problem: one would customize a sub-interface for their own shop's needs and conventions. That's not a bad thing. But if we had a decent state-ful GUI markup standard, such wrappers would be lite, more about managing domain patterns & defaults than reinventing a GUI engine and common GUI widgets from scratch.

Here's a partial list of GUI widgets & idioms that DOM lacks or does half-ass: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/otixwo/comment...

lmm• 4 years ago

Many frameworks aren't as extreme as Rails with its public interface of over 1200 methods. But all offer an API, functions, classes, to be used by the user of the framework: it's the whole point of the framework to offer this!

Some frameworks make the effort to make a clear distinction between which methods you can extend, which you can call, and which are framework-internal. The only one I've seen that really did this properly is Wicket, but it absolutely does work: you can fearlessly upgrade even a major version. (Of course the cost is you sometimes find yourself cursing because the method you wanted to override is final, so instead you have to copy-paste it and accept the maintenance burden belongs to you now - but you're doing so explicitly in that case).

The more isolation, the better maintainable. The code that handles e.g. token authentication should not be written by us, but be included in a single, well contained, bounded area. One that encapsulates this and translates it into domain language, preferably. E.g. behind a authentication.is_known_as_admin(request.token) rather than sprinkled throughout our controllers, commandline-interfaces, scripts, or async jobs.

This sounds superficially like good advice, but it's practically impossible in a language without monads, and often ends up as the "inner-platform effect" - sure, you've put a wrapper around the library, but reimplementing your wrapper to switch out that library is no easier than reimplementing your first library's API directly on second library. In my experience you're better off YOLOing it most of the time. If you ever do need to remove or replace a dependency, you can do the work then rather than front-loading it, and it's actually pretty easy - delete the dependency, fix the compilation errors, and you're done.

TillE• 4 years ago

This is like saying game engines can be clunky and get in your way (absolutely true), therefore you should just glue a bunch of libraries together.

In practice, that almost never works out well. You want to carefully pick the right tools for the job, but those tools will be enormously helpful when dealing with any kind of complex task, even if you can recite a litany of annoyances.

Of course if you don't have a complex task at hand, go nuts, find a sleek solution that truly fits your needs.

baobabKoodaa3• 4 years ago

Your point works better in game dev than it does in web dev.

quantum_state• 4 years ago

It’s not even wrong …

tracerbulletx• 4 years ago

I'm glad I started my professional career working on a large Django app, I think learning about its abstractions and organization gave me a really good starting point in building my mental model of all the problems sufficiently complex web applications end up having to solve. Now I often find I prefer, or am in a situation where the companies architecture dictates writing projects and services with much simpler dependency graphs, I've also found the prospect of deploying web applications with python a lot less appealing, but there are many reasons the opinionated all-in frameworks like Django and Rails were and are awesome.

forgotmypw172• 4 years ago

Have to agree.

Just the framework itself usually requires maintenance, unless the developer prioritizes backwards compatibility, which is rarely the case.

zinckiwi• 4 years ago

Sure. But not using a framework will harm the maintenance of your software more.

platz• 4 years ago

He likes to generalize the kinds of problems he has with Rails and Rails-like frameworks to all frameworks. This seems impertinent, since Rails-style frameworks are a particular style/flavor of framework, those of which I'm sure experience the problems he describes, but more generally? I'm not so sure about that.

bayesian_horse2• 4 years ago

What even is a framework-free web application? Do you have to write the HTTP server yourself?

baobabKoodaa3• 4 years ago

The author started their post by defining what they mean by "framework" and it's pretty clear that your snark "do you have to write the HTTP server yourself" is way off from that definition.

Also, if you don't have any experience with framework-free web applications - to the point where you can't imagine how one might exist - perhaps it would be a good idea to familiarize yourself with one? Yes, they exist. I've written several.

oblib• 4 years ago

I decided not to use a framework. I spent about a month going over the "TodoMVC.com" demos with the intent to choose one but after a few weeks of pondering which one I concluded I didn't want to invest in any of them.

jQuery and Mustache.js do a lot and are easy to use. CouchDB and PouchDB are too and that gave me user authentication, a powerful server side DB, and offline-first/local-first features.

I've never regretted those decisions but I had no investment in SQL DBs. Over the years since I've seen other's who've did struggle with CouchDB and I get that. I came from using CGI.pm's "Save" and "Get" functions and CouchDB/PouchDB.js are similar in how you use them, but way better.

matthewwolfe• 4 years ago

Wow a lot of those Todo MVC codebases are very out of date

WA• 4 years ago

CouchDB and PouchDB are too and that gave me user authentication, a powerful server side DB, and offline-first/local-first features

I use CouchDB / PouchDB as well, but I'm curious about user authentication: I had to implement a wrapper around it (in Node), because CouchDB auth is extremely limited. For example, I want users to sign up by email + password (not username) and I want them to be able to change their username. CouchDB itself basically has no concept of that. You make a user with a name and that's it. Can't change it without additional code.

How did you solve this?

rglover• 4 years ago

Unless the framework you're using treats maintainability as a feature [1], not an afterthought.

This is really just a long argument against bad framework design (which is fair), not frameworks.

[1] https://github.com/cheatcode/joystick#what-distinguishes-joy...

SevenNation• 4 years ago

Many people will argue that not using a framework means write everything yourself. This is a false dichotomy. We can use libraries and frameworks just fine. ...
But we should give them a clear, and well-isolated place in our project. ...

There's an excellent, if older, presentation called "Architecture, the Lost Years" that addresses exactly this problem and gives very specific, actionable guidance on how to solve it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpkDN78P884

But how to pull off this decoupling? The answer is both obvious and surprising. Define a boundary. On one side is the framework. On the other side is your code. Through the boundary, only dumb data structure can pass. JSON works. So do structs. So does XML. The point is that these are behaviorless blobs of data.

This buys you a lot. You can run your application completely detached from the network, a database, and other expensive dependencies. So testing becomes much simpler and easier. And of course, you can replace the framework by writing new boundary code.

The other big lesson has something to do with why frameworks get added to a project in the first place. When designing a system, the goal should be to defer major decisions for a long as possible. That's when the best information is available. Sometimes you can just defer until the point becomes moot, which is a major win.

Reaching for a framework before being forced to do so sets up the kind of situation the author is talking about.

googlryas• 4 years ago

Isn't the problem here that your decouple framework requires data X,Y, and Z in the message across the boundary, so you plumb that data through right near boundary where the request is made. But later on, you want to switch out a different framework, but that framework requires U, V, W, X, f(y), and Z. So even on your apps side of the boundary layer, you still formatted your code and data flow to support the single framework you started with.

fuzzy2• 4 years ago

If your message contains framework-dependent data, it wasn’t decoupled.

For example, in a typical web API, all the stuff concerning HTTP endpoints, JSON, OpenID Connect or whatever should be entirely separate from your domain logic. I’ve been doing this for years and it is very feasible.

Do you still have to write code where the framework dictates its structure? Absolutely. That’s the decoupling layer. Do you have to change this layer if you upgrade or switch frameworks? Also yes. However, you don’t have to touch the application core.

hamandcheese• 4 years ago

“When designing a system, the goal should be to defer major decisions for a long as possible.”

I noticed that I tend to do this, but never knew it was a legit strategy.

phendrenad2• 4 years ago

I strongly caution solo developers away from using a backend framework. A frontend framework is necessary for modern web development. Every HN startup should be going as minimal as possible.

Once you have 2 or more developers, you'll need to adopt a framework for new work (Rails, Django, etc.). Once you have 20 or more developers, you'll have more frameworks than you can count. And that's ideal.

jcelerier• 4 years ago

I absolutely disagree. I use Qt for most of my GUI C++ apps, it is very framework-y and a joy to get things done with.

Since last year I've been working on a framework for making media processors (audio, etc): https://github.com/celtera/avendish

Every year I have 2/3 internship students. This year I put them on this framework as a baseline, compared to the previous years where the students would have to do things more manually through libraries. They all got at least 5 times as much done as the students of the previous years in the same 3-4 months span of time.

tbrownaw6• 4 years ago

So, frameworks are bad, unless you follow standard advice about loose coupling?

I'd think most things would be bad if you failed to follow that advice about them, and the frameworks I'm most familiar with (aspnet core, ef core) seem to be pretty good about making it easy to follow.

Qwertious3• 4 years ago

No, the article is saying "frameworks are bad, unless you follow nonstandard advice about loose coupling.

imoverclocked• 4 years ago

Companies that have, "A team that defines the standards, processes, practices, frameworks or architectures that other teams must follow," are amongst the lowest performers. Reversed: companies that lack this, amongst the high performers.

(formatting edited)

1) I'd like to see real data behind this claim. (feels very anecdata and I have reversely correlated anecdata)

2) Companies that have large codebases or large developer populations and don't have any of these things are often headed for disaster.

tbrownaw6• 4 years ago

That's from the state of DevOps surveys. Those aren't causal and define performance oddly.

I'd speculate that companies that benefit from that sort of standardization probably don't care about blindly maximizing deploys/day (maybe nightly plus emergencies is enough) or minimizing time from coding started to deployment finished (maybe a better starting point is when the request is first made, or maybe they're optimizing for development throughout instead).

sodapopcan• 4 years ago

While I don't necessarily agree with most of this article, it's very good. It really just illustrates why so many people get jaded with tech.

I believe you can absolutely build your own well-documented framework and be successful, but ultimately some little sh*t is probably going to come in either say, "Why aren't we using React? Let's rewrite in React!" or "I don't like how this is done so I'm just going to redo it some other way I like in this one place." From here you have your camp of people who say, "Just don't let that happen!" and then your other camp of people who say, "I need to hire people, and nobody wants our custom stuff on their resume so let's just use TodaysFlavour.js so we can hire whoever and make the investors happy". And that's, like, two scenarios of many.

I guess all I'm saying is that it's really hard to find value from articles like this one when the surface area of the context is pretty much unimaginably wide.

I like frameworks and two of my professional anecdotes are: I once worked for a company with an absolutely horrid culture yet their codebase was rails done "the rails way (tm)" and it was great! I got my bearings immediately and pretty much had no questions about where anything was (which was good because I didn't want to talk to my coworkers... don't worry, I didn't stay there long). I also worked at a much better company where one or two people were hell-bent on coming up with their own ideas while everyone else mostly didn't care and just wanted to get the work done. This is well-and-good but these people had already decided a previous defined way of doing things was no good so they changed that, and when they leave, I can bet that whoever replaces them will decide that their well-documented way of doing things was no good. I wish people would just follow the framework unless it doesn't make sense to (which you only actually know after you've tried to do it the framework's way).

Well, I've written way too much already for a comment... But I'll add that I think the biggest thing this article misses is its points around "speed of development". Speed of development is always important in the beginning. Once the idea has been proven to work market fit, then the generators this article talks about are no longer important.

Anyway ya, Imma shut up now. Overall, good article. I'm going to read it again tomorrow as I'm sure I missed a lot.

quickthrower23• 4 years ago

tl;dr: NIH

Qwertious3• 4 years ago

tldr: "libraries > frameworks"

Joel_Mckay9• 4 years ago

"Frameworks are designed to take your project hostage" Wow, that is some enterprise level FUD, and with zero citations to back up that assertion.

  While one could possibly see 3rd party external dependencies pose a variable cost, service risk, or security issue... a standalone/maintainable site should not have 25 domains for every lame js widget a designer thought looked cool.

Those who do not use a good framework, are simply doomed to rewrite a buggier implementation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvVPdyYeaQU

smeagull• 4 years ago

You don't need a framework. You can control execution and use libraries. Once you use a framework changing back is hard. Removing a library on the other hand is easy. Because for libraries you control execution, and for frameworks you have to fuck your code so it will obey the requirements of that framework.

Joel_Mckay9• 4 years ago

Easier still, Spiral-development doesn't have to plan anything except the next feature... works right up to the point it implodes.

Thank you, I will see myself out... ;)

mmis10002• 4 years ago

If library is deprecated. You replace the library.

If framework is deprecated. You give up the project or rewrite 'everything' to use another framework because essentially your project is build on it.

That's the difference.

If you make abstract to make it suitable to port to another framework. Then you are writing yet another framework on the top of a framework. In my opinion, it's even worse.

hinkley7• 4 years ago

In my experience, I lack the talent for truly graphic swearing that would be required to adequately communicate just how much worse it is. Wrapping frameworks is like throwing water on a grease fire. Or maybe like someone else throwing water on the grease fire while you're standing inside the splash radius.

The only way to win is not to play, but the best way to minimize the damage if you can't avoid it entirely is this: escape out of the framework code into 'normal' code as fast as possible. The framework only calls glue code. All of your real logic and investment is in code that uses Plain Old <Language> data structures and that's it. That'll keep you sane.

It also is a great way to pop out bits of your logic into separate little programs where you can do things like write utilities that let you reason about the bigger system in bite sized chunks, or even to use benchmarking tools to do A/B testing of different implementation details of one subsystem, without the noise of the rest of the system getting in the way.

Joel_Mckay9• 4 years ago

I find it highly improbable you have never encountered a Facade pattern. ;)

theshrike792• 4 years ago

You can affect this by picking the framework properly.

The chances of Spring Framework, React or .Net being deprecated are zero to none. Even if they are sunset, there will be a) years of warning b) a cottage industry of open-source options.

Or you can hamper your project by abstracting EVERYTHING in your software to be 100% free to switch any library or framework at a moment's notice with minimal work. In essence building a meta-framework yourself :)

onion2k3• 4 years ago

If framework is deprecated. You give up the project or rewrite 'everything' to use another framework because essentially your project is build on it.

Or you just carry on using the deprecated version. It doesn't stop working.

If your team is sufficiently skilled you fork the framework and carry on developing it yourself.

There's lots of options other than just giving up.

Besides, how often is a framework deprecated? It hardly ever happens. This line of reasoning is the same as the old "We'd better use a database abstraction just in case we change database!", something that no one has ever done in the history of IT projects (this is hyperbole on my part, but it's pretty much true.)

jgrpf2• 4 years ago

With framework maintainers providing paid support, extending services or an ecosystem with commercial components it somewhat makes sense even if not outright obvious or intentional.

meesterdude3• 4 years ago

To put it simply, this reflects an amateur understanding of frameworks. I know where the author is coming from, because I've been there/done that/tried that. It sounds nice on paper, but experience has shown that this is a poor way to approach software development.

I see this kind of mindset with developers who think only about code, and not about solving problems at scale with other people.

jonwinstanley3• 4 years ago

Totally agree. Hiring is the big one for me.

As a business owner, you need to be able to easily find new developers to slot into your team who can get up to speed quickly.

This is much more easily done when your app is something like Rails, Django or Laravel.

fullstackchris2• 4 years ago

Don't you want the engineers who are language agnostic, and have seen many a many framework and can quickly learn any quirks from your existing team?

twobitshifter• 4 years ago

Maintainability is how long it takes you to solve a problem. If the reliability of the framework exceeds that of code you could write then we're limiting the overall scope that must be maintained to begin with. Now on to what issues look like with frameworks, if you use the framework as designed, the code should follow convention - convention improves maintainability. If your framework can't do what's asked, it's been misapplied and another tool is needed. Using a tool improperly is terrible for maintenance

Alacart• 4 years ago

This pretty much sums it up. Narrowing the scope of maintenance is a big deal. Once I'm confident in the quality of a framework, the next question is how likely and how often am I going to need to use escape hatches for this project now and in the medium term. If I expect too many (or too difficult) escape hatches, it's the wrong tool. If I can't find a framework that I'm reasonably confident in that way, only then would I go without. If so, whatever I come up with is by default a framework. It's just probably not going to be as good as an open source one.

plaguepilled• 4 years ago

Citation needed: the blogpost. Less FUD on HN please and thanks.

langsoul-com2• 4 years ago

Even though he has a point about harming future maintenance and how the framework has no obligation to give a damn about what you need.

Ie, see React 18 introducing double rendering for state and useEffect on strict mode (on by default in Nextjs). Makes debugging harder when shit runs twice, all for some future update.

efficax• 4 years ago

you either use a framework or you end up writing (a bad, usually) framework

etchalon• 4 years ago

I feel like every decent developer goes through a period where they decide Frameworks aren't worth the hassle.

default-kramer• 4 years ago

If you read far enough, this is the author's actual complaint: "Yet most frameworks come with all those details up-front and mixed up. They often make it very hard, if not impossible, to be isolated." I disagree. Very few of the frameworks I've used have made it difficult for me to write all the interesting parts of my app in a framework-agnostic way. A complaint I could agree with is "frameworks tempt people to write too much framework-dependent code", but a purely technical criticism does not match my experience with frameworks.

lucasfcosta• 4 years ago

I don’t fully agree. The author has quite a few excellent points, but when one says it may “harm” the “maintenance” of your software one must define which variables are used to measure “maintainability”. Is it MTTR, cycle times, bug density, or what?

Speaking of maintenance in broad terms makes the argument fuzzy.

henning• 4 years ago

This is what happens when you view your application as an abstract Platonic object, immortal and perfect, outside any actual concrete implementation. Making the app serve web requests is part of the problem to be solved. The problem is the problem. Looking up whether a user exists as part of handling a request is completely fine because that's the simplest way to make the app do what it needs to do.

If you have some stupid "clean architecture" layer bullshit where your own application doesn't know how any of the rest of it works and everything is absurdly decoupled via some hexagonal bullshit, you're going to get into shitty situations where e.g. you have to call the database repository to do N queries rather than just one because the "clean domain layer" is written that way and the "HTTP message delivery layer" is only an "implementation detail" that has nothing to do with the pure business domain. Then your product will fucking suck fucking shit and you haven't actually solved the problem.

yi_xuan• 4 years ago

Frameworks subject to MVC pattern are logical cohesion, and tight coupled. In this respect, other frameworks, like Flask, are much better.

SkyMarshal• 4 years ago

This is a beautiful blog. Love the typography and layout and readability. Looks like Jekyll fwiw [1].

[1] https://github.com/berkes/berkes.github.com

berkes11• 4 years ago

Yup. Jekyll indeed.

Though a really old one. I should really upgrade, but -being a static site- never felt an urgent need, all the security flaws in any of the dependencies are hardly relevant. :)

8n4vidtmkvmk5• 4 years ago

I'm experiencing this with Laravel. I'm stuck on 5.2 while they're on v9 now because the author thought it would be a good idea to arbitrarily change some method signatures because he regretted his decisions earlier, while not providing any additional value and I don't have the time to hunt all these down and refactor everything, and I feel unmotivated when he's made it clear he's a bad steward. He refused semver for the longest time, not sure if they're using it now but even if so, 4 more major breaks is not encouraging

dvko• 4 years ago

That’s Laravel in a nutshell. I tried it for a year, then got fed up with all the useless name changes or directory layout changes after every “minor” (yeah, no SemVer) and moved to Symfony with their LTS promise. Still happy with that decision.

mrunkel• 4 years ago

There is no reason to be stuck on a previous version of Laravel.

With the help of rector, it should be an afternoon's work to upgrade.

https://github.com/rectorphp/rector

8n4vidtmkvmk5• 4 years ago

I will be astonished if that works, especially with all the nonstandard junk I've done to my codebase, but I will give it a whirl. Thank you, didn't know about this. I did see a paid version of something similar before but never tried it.

jonwinstanley3• 4 years ago

I’ve upgraded a large application all the way from 5.2 to 9. It does take a long while, but is well worth it in the end.

They provide an upgrade guide which is pretty comprehensive.

Im not saying it’s simple, but it certainly wasn’t as bad as I imagined it would be.

Good luck getting through it!

darylteo• 4 years ago

Stuck on Zend Framework 1 :D

onion2k3• 4 years ago

I don't have the time to hunt all these down and refactor everything

Yes you do. You're just choosing to spend that time on other things rather than pay off some of the technical debt (that the framework introduced rather than you). Your decision to just live with the old version will prove to be a bad one in the long term: you'll find it frustrating, your skills will stagnate, new hires will find it frustrating (and will quit), eventually 5.2 will stop receiving patches so your security will be compromised, and you'll miss out on some of the shiny new features in the latest versions. This will get harder the longer you leave it.

It's worth investing the time to move with the framework even if the framework is a pain at times.

8n4vidtmkvmk5• 4 years ago

Sure. Every time someone says "I don't have time" they really mean "I'm prioritizing other things higher".

I don't have any employees yet =) And I do firmly believe launching a few more features is worth more than eliminating some tech debt.

habibur• 4 years ago

That brings up the old debate between framework vs library.

My personal conclusion had been don't use frameworks, rather use libraries.

itake2• 4 years ago

I am getting bit in the butt right now for using the ionic framework for building a multi-platform mobile app.

If I want to build a mobile app in JS, but not use a framework (ionic/cordova/react native), how do I proceed?

While I admit framework-driven cross platform mobile apps are bad, even native code is vulnerable to OS updates shifting the ground from underneath them.

How do you use a library in mobile app dev?

jonwinstanley3• 4 years ago

Surely in this situation a framework is pretty much your only choice?

Trying to do this yourself would be very complex and stop you from writing your actual app?

42e6e8c8-f7b8-44• 4 years ago

Once you go to the grocery store and pick the 25 different libraries fundamental to your application, congratulations! You've created a completely new interaction between those sets of libraries and you get to debug those interactions instead of your own code for a portion of your time.

I've seen this with python flask REST environments where folks pull all these tiny pieces off the shelf and stitch them together. Meanwhile Django REST Framework has a mostly common baseline that you adopt and then diverge from as needed.

didip• 4 years ago

The problem with using a framework is that the upgrade tax is steep.

Every major version change is basically an Armageddon.

This is one reason why micro service design is popular, you can throw away everything later.

42e6e8c8-f7b8-44• 4 years ago

I think that says more about the maintainers than libraries vs framework. Some maintainers value backwards compatibility and some don't. Some value the time of their users more than the purity of their platform/framework. React as a framework seems to value it's users -- upgrading isn't that hard. Angular 1 to 2 didn't. Microsoft and x86 worship backward compatibility -- 30 year old programs frequently run without a hitch on the PC platform, thus showing that they value backward compatibility. Anything written against a Google sdk or api or platform will need to be reworked every 2-3 years or the app will break.

osigurdson3• 4 years ago

Libraries that you can call from your code are conceptually much simpler than frameworks that call your code. I don't think this means that zero frameworks should exist, but frameworks are generally not composable (hard to use many in a single application) while libraries compose trivially.

crossroadsguy• 4 years ago

Number of people here (apparently) confusing frameworks and libraries is kinda surprising.

With framework, your app becomes the framework and that framework becomes your app. There’s no abstraction and clear separation like with libs. Oh, maybe you can have abstraction with frameworks, but then why use the framework in the first place.

emsimot• 4 years ago

I was against frameworks until I used re-frame in Clojurescript. If the framework is sufficiently pluggable it can be incredibly valuable.

gonzo412• 4 years ago

It's been a whilst since we've had one of these on HN. What a bit of fun. My 2c. There's a choice about the work you do. does your work satisfy a business requirement, or does it satisfy your ego.

I need a site for work for a 3 year project, CRUD, users, auth, sessions. Django's perfect for my team of 1.5. It wouldn't be responsible to roll my own, when I can have the bare bones of that site up and ready to go within a day.

This is like complaining that X company is locked in because of a chipset, and suggesting they branch out into lithography to ease that burden.

Is your core business getting things done, or is it flexing by rolling your own framework.

herr_gurke3• 4 years ago

I did some Django but in the days, and I completely agree that as long as you have CRUD, Django shines. The issue starts when you cannot really fit your uses cases into simple CRUD and you start to fight against the framework to achieve this.

The author also made a point of negligible gains - even if you spend a week to setup auth, sessions etc. if still negligible for longer running projects

gonzo412• 4 years ago

I've worked on to many long dead projects with scant doco and the best ones are always where people colored inside the lines. Remember google web toolkit? That flamed out hard 15? years ago.

I've recently had to make a mod to a decaying app written in GWT. It was easy because no one got creative. I think theres a long term risk with rolling you're own that you box yourself into a lot of corners without knowing it.

osigurdson3• 4 years ago

> A team that defines the standards, processes, practices, frameworks or architectures that other teams must follow..are amongst the lowest performers.

It is a matter of degree. If teams responsible for this are legitimately trying to make things better (and not just trying to infallible high priests), it can be helpful. If there are established ways of doing things, it can sometimes alleviate the need to make the same decisions over and over again.

civilized• 4 years ago

At a minimum, Technology Standards Czar has to be earned. You can't just conjure up a spot on the org chart one day and staff it with some outside rando with a long, jargon-stuffed resume. The Technology Standards Czar should be an internal hire with a history of making good technology decisions for the org.

osigurdson3• 4 years ago

I wouldn't even call them a Czar. Consistency facilitator might be better.

personjerry• 4 years ago

Not using a framework will harm the existence of your software

z3t4• 4 years ago

It depends a lot how strong/leaky the abstraction layer is. For example nodejs and PHP are less leaky then the abstraction layers (frameworks) applied on top of them. So the more layers of frameworks stacked on top the faster it is to get a working demo, but the harder it will be to maintain.

hinkley7• 4 years ago

I will just sit over here nodding along and not making any eye contact with anyone who mentions unit testing frameworks...

berkes11• 4 years ago

Unit testing libraries are very valuable.

A unit-testing framework? What does it really do? It has a test-runner. But running software isn't some black magic, its easy and solved. It has naming conventions. But those are really just something a team can pick and never look back. It has ways to call functions based on those naming conventions. But that is really an extension to the test-runner.

Now, all the assert_contains, has_called_x, those are valuable. But easily offered as library.

bradwood• 4 years ago

Here I was thinking this was a knock against the Framework laptop offering dho

raydiatian• 4 years ago

Using a Framework will harm the maintenance of your software

“Time will harm the maintenance of software.”

Simpler, more correct.

deltasevennine• 4 years ago

Kind of a useless argument.

Frameworks are designed to predict the future about how they're going to be used. They're often wrong in that prediction but people try to write frameworks nonetheless.

If you're not using a public framework then you're writing one from scratch. If you're writing a framework from scratch then you're predicting the future. If you're predicting the future you'll probably be wrong, and the person who came after you is stuck using your framework.

Since most people don't greenfield apps, most people will be stuck using someone elses framework.

The problem with frameworks is the problem with software. How do we design things such that the design has enough flexibility to perfectly anticipate the future?

culi• 4 years ago

As everyone else pointed out, frameworks are a natural evolution of sufficiently complex applications and "framework-less" codebases often have their own proto-framework solutions to things.

I don't think the issue is frameworks but rather being locked in to a framework. I'm really interested in seeing where the micro-frontend trend as well as island-centric tools like Astro, Fresh, or Hotwire evolve. Tools like these show it might not be the frameworks themselves but rather the way we use the frameworks that are the issue. Despite React praise for being "a library not a framework", there is a very clear focus on SPAs throughout the ecosystem and I feel like its potential flexibility is really stifled by this

fullstackchris2• 4 years ago

Every time I see anti framework posts I am forced to frusteratedly chime in. This mentality makes me fume... not all of us work on massive teams where building stuff without a framework is even an option.

And even then, whats really a "framework"? You could argue it's even the language itself. Android apps used to be written in Java, and now they are pushing Kotlin way harder (and it may even be the default soon). Everyone who wrote those JavaScript apps back in the 1990s without TypeScript, are they still just as maintainable as their TypeScript counterparts? Such a shortsided and ignorant view IMO.

I think what bugs me the most is any sort of purist mentality (about anything) in software engineering. WE ARE ENGINEEERS. ENGINEERS USE THE RIGHT TOOL FOR THE RIGHT JOB! It should NEVER be "always use X", "never use Y". Both X and Y exist for a reason, so they are both useful for some reason.

And again, because I'm an engineer, I've also built my fair share of apps in just "purist" languages, the classic HTML / CSS / JavaScript, so I'm not against the purist approach either. Again, right tool for the right job.

interactivecode• 4 years ago

also typescript apps that haven't had active development in the last 10 years will be a pain to work with again. Toolchains need maintenance and upkeep.

berkes11• 4 years ago

And even then, whats really a "framework"?

I've tried to answer that in the article. Anything that I should have clarified even more?

Do note that I make an explicit distinction between libraries and frameworks. I'm not expecting a one-man-show to write the SSL libs or even the HTTP routing: there are perfect libs for that.

When this HTTP library lives on the side of your app, abstracted away behind e.g. ports&adapters there really isn't any issue. It could be Sinatra, Flask or such.

My article wasn't meant to argue against code-reuse, au contraire. It was meant to explain that there's "dangerous" code-reuse, and good code-reuse. That with the wrong re-use of existing code, you'll paint yourself in a corner that might easily prove impossible to get out of. Frameworks, I argue, are such code-reuse. Libraries, used and layed out in architectural patterns is, I argue, the alternative that allows for longer living projects.

cbsmith4• 4 years ago

I'll take advantage of the fact that you commented here to point out something unrelated that I found concerning in the article's reasoning:

""" Companies that have..

    A team that defines the standards, processes, practices, frameworks or architectures that other teams must follow.

...are amongst the lowest performers. Reversed: companies that lack this, amongst the high performers.

In other words: enforced standardising the tech, doesn't pay off.

This makes sense: if everyone in a company is forced to use, say, Django, for any project, regardless, there will be a lot of projects where Django is a very poor choice. """

I think that's not too far from presuming you should put armour where you find the most bullet holes in the planes that come back.

You have to keep in mind that an implicit trait of all of these companies is that they are still in business, despite having a "low" ranking for the evolution of their tech team. That speaks volumes about what it takes for their business to succeed, and apparently it isn't investing in a high quality technology team. Despite that, they've survived, and it's entirely possible that having "a team defining standards, processes, practices, frameworks or architectures that other teams must follow" is the trick that's staved off their otherwise higher propensity for existential disasters.

Of course, that's presuming there's any kind of causal relationship between having such a team and outcomes. In reality, the survey found that 16% of "low" companies had such a team, but 10% of mid and 7% of high companies also did. That's as compared to 15% of "low" companies that had a team that responds to tickets related to infrastructure issues, whereas only 6% of mid-level and 5% of high level issues... or the even bigger discriminant of a team that provides software delivery solutions for many feature teams through self-service APIs, which made up 3% of low teams, but 15% of mid-level teams and 23% of high-level teams. In that context, maybe having a team that defines standards & practices really is driven by factors that at best correlate somewhat with how evolved your tech team is.

...and I think one could argue much the same thing about frameworks, for much the same reason.

Realistically, having a team defining standards & practices doesn't actually play out as "if everyone in a company is forced to use, say, Django, for any project, regardless, there will be a lot of projects where Django is a very poor choice." The entire job of centralized teams like that is not to make everyone use one technology for everything, but rather to allow teams to operate independently while avoiding all the inefficiencies that come from teams using different tools that don't actually add much value but certainly subtract value. Take the case of choosing Django. If you don't need anything like Django, of course you shouldn't be using it. That's not what standards are intended for. What they are intended for is cases where using Django may be a perfectly fine tool for what your team is doing, BUT if you used Flask instead it really wouldn't matter that much. There might be a whole ton of other teams using Flask, a lot of tribal knowledge about how to operate it, and a ton of tooling that's already been integrated with it. While it might be better to use Django for your specific project (more often than not, that's not actually the case), in aggregate for the organization, it's way better if you just use the same technology as everyone else... and where things go organizationally overall in the long run is far worse, because with everyone using different technologies and no consideration for how they all interoperate together, you have no common fabric you can plug in to effect systemic change.

TeeMassive• 4 years ago

And even then, whats really a "framework"?

For me a framework is a library that you can't get rid of and adds complexity that transcends language, IDE and compilation.

cbsmith4• 4 years ago

So if it helps, it's not a framework.

Kind of like Scotsmen. ;-)

seydor• 4 years ago

the real reason frameworks are a burden is that you re not allowed to edit their code. We should be able to change every bit of the architecture for whatever reasons to make it an organic , coevolving part of our project. But for this to be possible we will need AI to perform external upgrades without breaking our code

stevebmark• 4 years ago

Rails will harm the maintenance of your software*

*Is really the accurate summation of the article. And yes, this is well known. Every article about a company upgrading Rails is "it took us several years and only three people died." And we know better than to use MVC nowadays.

No offense to Rubyists, but in the Ruby ecosystem, I have seen a disturbing lack of absorbing information from other programming ecosystems. This article smells like that to me. If you've only used Ruby and Rails, you might not realize some of the dangers and inherent limitations of the design unless you've worked in other ecosystems.

jarek834• 4 years ago

I agree on how this article is mis-titled. It's clear that the author just hates Rails.

Now - I use RoR and other ecosystems and I really miss Ruby or RoR features in those other ones.

berkes11• 4 years ago

I'm the author and I certainly don't hate Rails.

I use it for several projects still and will continue using it when the use-case is apt.

throwaway2903• 4 years ago

This article seems wrong on every possible level.

This makes sense: if everyone in a company is forced to use, say, Django, for any project, regardless, there will be a lot of projects where Django is a very poor choice.

Sorry, if you are forced to use a framework that's your beef with the company not the framework.

if the use of framework slows down shipping of new features today, it is causing harm. ... when the use of a framework allows shipping features fast early on, at the cost of slowing down the shipping of new features or changes later on, that is harming maintenance. ... when the framework diverts resources into work that has nothing to do with delivering value to your customers.

You just described tests. Any app will become slower to maintain as you need to update the increasing amount of tests. Guess what, framework does the bunch of it letting you focus on testing business logic, and it does so at a cost of imposing a structure.

a last type of harm, is when a framework that was once a good fit for a project, is no longer a good fit.

That's just reality. I guess coming up with your own structure somehow makes your app immune to having to ever refactor it?

IMO the author thought framework is a silver bullet that allows you to not think or care about the architecture at all and now is channeling misplaced disappointment.

huimang2• 4 years ago

Most sufficiently complex codebases that aren’t “framework” based will have a poorly implemented, feature-lacking, bug-ridden version of a framework eventually.

If Django doesn’t fit the use case for your thing, don’t use it? Just don’t use flask and then start reimplementing Django.

Also, Rails is better Django. It’s not even a close comparison.

herr_gurke3• 4 years ago

The issue starts if you start with Django, but later on you discover that there it does not support your use case anymore.

huimang2• 4 years ago

It’s impossible to predict the future. I would rather start with rails and rewrite portions later on, than start with Sinatra and shoddily reimplement rails features.

I also just think Django is terrible compared to rails, and that may be why the author has such a dim view of frameworks in general.

It’s worth noting huge companies started with frameworks initially. Just looking at rails: Twitter, Shopify, Airbnb, Basecamp, ..

42e6e8c8-f7b8-44• 4 years ago

Every flask REST implementation I've seen has been a bespoke library combinatorics mess compared to something that could have been written in Django REST framework.

tobyhinloopen• 4 years ago

Better title: Using Rails will harm the maintenance of your software.

Because Rails sucks.

A framework like Phoenix (Elixir) is perfectly usable as a plugin.

RamblingCTO4• 4 years ago

Yeah, I think this is pretty language specific and really case-dependant. My ports-and-adapters project in golang is built so that I can easily switch out gin or gorm or graphQL in a bit. I don't really get this discussion haha

fbn79• 4 years ago

More experience I do into programming, more and more I coming to the opinion that Framework is just an alias of "Technical debt". Please use libs, not framework.

revskill• 4 years ago

Use of framework to me is a prove of lacking of knowledge for self-control.

Framework is a debt, not an asset.

o_m• 4 years ago

Most developers only have a two year horizon, and they are always thinking about the next job. If you learn some proprietary software it will hurt your chances to easily switch jobs in the future. So you end up choosing the company that uses the framework you believe you're going to keep using at your next job.

BiteCode_dev• 4 years ago

It's not an "or" proposition.

E.G: a complex django project will have parts that don't use the framework at all. In fact, I never ever use forms with Django, and I do use raw SQL.

Not to mention you can start with a framework, and remove pieces you don't need on the way. Like Instagram did with the django ORM.

Of course, you have to choose a framework with the proper balance for this to work.

Purists want their project to be homogeneous, but it never ends up that way because engineering is a about compromises and dev is only partially about code.

And in the end, you framework will not harms more your maintenance that home made structure, it will just put the burden of maintenance on different levels, which may or may not be what you want depending of your objectives.

But usually, you are not Google, and you have neither the requirements or abilities of such a big structures. Which means a framework is likely bringing more than it's going to cost you if you look at the project average cost during it's entire life. Provided the framework is well made, chosen and integrated, which is a big if, but then you have similar ifs for custom systems.

jarek834• 4 years ago

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 reason is that frameworks have opportunity to be battle tested in terms of robustness and in terms of use cases. My stance here is that I love to use wheels instead of creating my own ones. I'm a project developer and not an academia developer.

The second type of devs are what I would avoid hiring to my projects if they wouldn't be an academia projects. I need to deliver business goals in a most efficient way. That efficiency has to be on multiple levels. One these levels is to that the code won't be depending on one or two my best developers, because there is a high chance they will go at some point. My project would then rely only on what they created and documented, hoping that documentation cover everything. But my project would also slowly deteriorate technically, because most devoted contributors would be gone. Frameworks usually take much longer to become abandoned.

I believe first type should work for businesses. The second type - should aim academia.

iveqy• 4 years ago

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.

willsmith723• 4 years ago

Agree on the importance of deleting code, but with "less code means shorter development time and cheaper maintenance", I don't think I've ever seen a program without a framework use "less code" than it would using one.

mightyRodri3• 4 years ago

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.

billythemaniam• 4 years ago

There is a third type: those of us that work with frameworks and build our own with libraries when needed. The right tool for the job essentially. The "right" framework is absolutely a net benefit, even in academia, but it can be very hard to pick the right one. Sometimes none of the available framework options are "right" either. The downsides of picking the wrong framework for a project are massive and worse than custom code in my experience. I rarely hear pro-framework-only people talk about the downsides, and I always wonder how experienced they are. Have they never seen a project go sideways by picking the wrong framework?

philote• 4 years ago

I'd propose a different dichotomy: those that have good experience using and developing complex systems, and those that don't. The former are more likely to fit with your dichotomy, while the latter are more likely to do what's best for their project.

Though nobody can predict the future and what seems like the right choice initially might not be later on.

low_tech_punk• 4 years ago

1. "If you don't use a framework, you will end up creating one" -- And that's exactly how successful frameworks were born. If everyone uses an existing framework, who is to create better frameworks for the future?

2. Framework vs. Library -- Framework calls your code; Library is called by your code. There is clear inversion of control. The article touched on this, but I think it's a very important distinction to call out.

3. Framework makes me think inheritance. Library makes me think composition.

4. Framework is like CPUs. A more powerful CPU is a more powerful CPU, no doubt; but you need more power to bring out the performance. If your company don't have the resource to deal with the maintenance, Framework becomes a liability rather than asset. But if you can sustain it, it should still be a net positive.

5. In addition to the mixing of domain and non-domain concerns, poor Framework bring incomplete abstraction that expands the surface area for reasoning/debugging/maintaining. A good framework should provide the perfect abstraction that frees the developer from having to descend the stacks. I consider programming languages as good "frameworks". So are the layered networking architecture.

6. Watch out for self-fulfilling prophecies. e.g. in the web frontend framework space, a framework might claim it helps solve problem X, but it might also be very cause problem X. Accessibility, Routing, State Management... a lot of these can be solved by using the platform. Before you reach out for a framework, be sure to assess platform capabilities and single purpose libraries first.

7. Reliance on framework can be caused by lack of knowledge. If you are a manager, give your team the time, money, and endorsement they need to learn things, attend conferences, and provide ample budget for training and technical book purchase. They might pay more dividends than a framework does.

p-e-w• 4 years ago

Developers use frameworks because frameworks that are used by many others take care of edge cases that most engineers have no chance of fixing, or even discovering, on their own.

Web framework code is typically riddled with comments like "this extra margin is added to the input to work around a bug in Internet Explorer 11 where Tibetan characters are cut off".

Good luck solving such issues without having tens of thousands of eyes and hundreds of hands to help you.

test1235• 4 years ago

you don't always need all the solutions a framework provides

e.g. your Tibetan users don't use IE11, so all your IE11-Tibetan code is just taking up disk space

You ain't gonna need it, and all that.

adrianthedev• 4 years ago

A bit dramatic and provocative. But a nice way to go in-depth with the pros and cons of a framework.

sz4kerto• 4 years ago

I think using a framework can help with the maintenance of the software.

Let me use the one that is usually used as a negative example in hacker circles: Spring.

Spring has a steep learning curve. Spring feels like too much magic. Spring makes simple things look complicated and hard to understand. Spring is large.

On the other hand: I don't care about making extremely simple things more complicated. In the enterprise world / large-scale SaaS development, we don't do extremely simple things. If we wanted to have a service that adds to two integers and returns the result, then it must have unit testing, integration testing, end-to-end testing lifecycle management, documentation, health checks, clusterability.

Why? Because we want to make our own lives easier by having ground rules for services and code, and anyone who starts maintaining, improving or operating a service knows that they can expect the stuff mentioned earlier.

So Spring gives us these out of the box. People learn it once, and then whenever they start to work on something new, they get Prometheus metrics, testability, proper logging, etc. right off the bat.

I find Spring (and other frameworks) annoying and boring as a hacker, and I find them very useful as a CTO when a large team is working on system and people come and go over years or decades.

pas• 4 years ago

exactly. and of course it's not impossible to identify the good things in Spring, then look for a different framework that has those but has less of the bad ones. Dropwizard was looking good a few years ago.

mtrycz2• 4 years ago

"Spring Boot" has inherited some of the good ideas from Dropwizard.

berjin• 4 years ago

SvelteKit made some breaking changes recently but they also had a migration script to re-write 99% of my code. I wish all frameworks did this.

adenozine• 4 years ago

Capitalizing Framework in the title made me think this had something to do with those laptops…

magicalhippo• 4 years ago

Using a framework will affect the maintenance of your software. So you need to consider that aspect before using it. If it will harm or hinder you, depends entirely on the specifics of both the framework and your project.

For example, source code availability is a big factor. Is your project short lived, say a prototype, or do you need it working for 10+ years? If the former, source code availability of the framework might not be an issue, if the latter then you certainly want the framework source.

Another point is if you need to track the latest version of the framework for some reason, or can you live with an old version. On Windows for example, you can still use Delphi 7, released in 2002, with its VCL framework to develop applications. Won't look pretty but will work.

abracadabra_3• 4 years ago

Write small, well tested services in the easiest to use framework you can find. If the service becomes hard to maintain then replace it. This should be a simple job guided by the tests.

willsmith723• 4 years ago

Not everything should be a small service

abracadabra_3• 4 years ago

Maybe not, but the larger it is the harder it is to change.

There are pros/cons to both sides.

42e6e8c8-f7b8-44• 4 years ago

People talk about services like libraries aren't a thing. That exact same statement with `s/services/libraries/`.

"Write small, well tested libraries..."

If you have a library with a solid, small public interface and you carefully maintain compatibility on that interface with great testing, you can be decoupled. Plus you don't have 2 network interfaces and the internet injected into a call to the interface.

abracadabra_3• 4 years ago

Yes, this applies almost equally well to libraries as well. With the slight exception that you are not just bringing the library into your code but all of its dependencies as well. This makes it _slightly_ harder to wholesale change a library compared to a service.

ThePhysicist• 4 years ago

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.

edf13• 4 years ago

No, it won’t

JodieBenitez• 4 years ago

The article tries to generalize but I think it's a bad idea since not all frameworks are equal. Back in 2005 (and to this day), I made websites with Django and it was relatively easy to maintain and upgrade them to follow the framework. I can't say the same thing about websites I made using the Zend Framework (now Laminas).

The wrong framework will harm the maintenance of your software. The right framework will keep it going for decades.

Of course it's not always obvious how a framework will evolve over time (let alone the requirements of your website/app/api), so the safe bet is to stick with the ones that already stood the the test of time.

ozim• 4 years ago

I love these technical topics because I can open up popcorn bag and read how people with statistical significance of 1 person experience throw their opinions and claim they have it all figured out.

In my 14-15 years of experience in software industry I learned that having framework helps mostly with that - having bunch of "know it alls" rounded up to use the same approach instead of having "I know better discussions".

Where frameworks shine is specifically lowering amount of discussions on technical details that has no relevance to the business but has all kind of opinions from devs.

Someone in the thread claims - if he is hired he has to learn framework - well I am hiring people with knowledge on framework we use, he might not have been looking for a job lately. I have not seen we hire c# or c or java dev - there is always framework in requirements. Just see how frontend devs ads look "react dev to hire"/"angular dev to hire" no one hires "someone who knows html and css", yes it is requirement to know these but you also have to know at least one framework.

bowsamic• 4 years ago

Why start your post with an "I love to see 1 sample anecdata" and then make a whole post doing the same thing?

berkes11• 4 years ago

Architectural patterns and design patterns can just as well help against "bikeshedding".

More than a framework. I avoided this topic in my article because it already is far too long :). But a framework such as Angular or Rails does three things here, all of which aren't really properties of the framework:

1. Dictate where to put files, and how to name stuff. 2. Dictate what architectural pattern you must use. Rails? MVC or GTFO. 3. Dictate what surrounding tech to use. RDBS, REST, template languages etc: you don't have a say, use them, or GTFO.

First, I don't think this is good, not because I know better, but because use-cases demand different setups. Sometimes Event-sourcing is crucial to a domain. Sometimes message-bus, sometimes microservices, sometimes monolyth. It really depends. Having the freedom to choose the best constraints and trade-offs for a project is IMO a crucial skill for long-term success.

But even if such bikeshedding is bad and "we use Rails for everything, from websites to bots to embedded software" is the proper thing. Nothing in those thre points come from a framework directly:

1. where to put what, how to name things? - ubiquitous language, a thesaurus a simple loader or even the language (rust "enforces" file naming conventions as a language). It's a good thing to have, but can be achieved without marrying to a framework with all its trade-offs. 2. What architecture to use? This should be the first thing. Maybe second is to then choose a framework that uses or allows this pattern. Not the other way around. So you'll need to do this anyway: frameworks or not. 3. Again, highly dependent on the use-case. The requirements should dictate the tech to be used, not the other way around. And the tech used then dictates whether a certain framework is feasible at all.

spion7• 4 years ago

I agree that there is a problem here, but I think its a slightly different one.

Frameworks and libraries both save you time and require you to invest some time. The main question is whether the savings will be bigger than the investment, and that question can be hard to answer.

In most cases we tend to err on the side of framework optimism - we presume a framework or library will always save time (don't reinvent the wheel, NIH syndrome, etc). Sometimes when we do this, its because we realize the deep rabbit hole of building something like the framework or library we're using. Other times, its because we don't know whether the hole is deep or not - we don't have the expertise to evaluate.

I think the second case is where most of the danger lies. Which is why, paradoxically, its a good idea for a software engineer to reimplement a few pieces of general purpose software in a more specific manner every once in a while and live with them for a longer time.

Unfortunately, this is not always possible; often the next best thing is to contribute to an existing open source project and ask (in the kindest way possible) why certain things were implemented in a certain way and/or learn from its commit and issue history. Learning doesn't mean you have to agree with the authors - in fact often even authors will lament certain design decisions that painted them into a corner or increased complexity unnecessarily.

Doing the above will make it easier to evaluate wheather a framework (or library) will save time or drain time. Without it, erring on the side of caution seems like the safer option, which is why we keep recommending it. However, sometimes the drain can be significantly bigger than the savings - if you're spending most of your time fighting the framework that's a signal that something is wrong and we should have a way of listening to that signal and responding strategically.

The downside of frameworks that I think the article is correct about: general-purpose software is really hard to get right. Every author has a specific set of experiences and needs which depend on their specific situation. It may be worth spending some time researching the kind of software built with that framework (or library) to see if there is any obvious bias that would make it not fit your problem domain or your specific context.

lll-o-lll3• 4 years ago

Thanks for taking the time to write this insightful comment.

ddevault• 4 years ago

Daniel Stone once pointed out a key difference between libweston and wlroots, two competing approaches for generalizing the work involved in building a Wayland compositor, to explain why wlroots succeeds where libweston does not. He drew the key distinction between a framework and a toolkit. Weston is the former and wlroots is the latter.

The difference is that a framework is in control and defers to your code from time to time, whereas with a toolkit, you are in control and defer to the toolkit when necessary. A toolkit-style library can still do most or all of the heavy lifting for you in a single library, but this approach is much more powerful and flexible than a framework approach while retaining most of the benefits.

Many people view the framework/no-framework debate from the angle that the no-framework side describes a hodgepodge of libraries thrown together to create a crappy half-framework in the downstream code, but that is not necessarily the case. A "one big dependency" approach works with or without the framework design, and a toolkit design offers many advantages that the framework approach cannot.

the-printer• 4 years ago

If you ever feel the need to divulge further into the concept of toolkits as opposed to frameworks, I would be most appreciative to read a blog post outlining such.

nottorp• 4 years ago

In a framework, unlike in libraries or in standard user applications, the overall program's flow of control is not dictated by the caller, but by the framework.
In other words, users can extend the framework, but cannot modify its code.

He is talking about a specific kind of framework, not about every library under the sun. And for those he may well be right.

Back when Unity was new, most games done with it kinda looked the same. I don't know if Unity evolved to allow more control/customization or people are just better at working around it now.

And if you browse the web, you eventually run into a bunch of sites that all kinda look the same and act the same. Again, this is due to the framework imposing their way to do things instead of the developers/designers deciding it. I suppose an experienced web dev could actually recognize what framework a site like that is done on without looking at the source code, just based on behaviour.

This may be good for cheap one offs but not so much long term indeed.

jll29• 4 years ago

Architectural mismatch leads to a clash when one's own architectur (or framework, for bigger projects) does not align well with another one that one wishes to use. As a friend of mine used to say "frameworks are like hollywood: you can't call us - we'll call you".

If you can, supply your functionality as a toolbox instead.

In the context of NLP, I addressed some of these issues with using frameworks and toolkits in this 2003 paper https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.3115/1119226.1119233 .

NikhilVerma• 4 years ago

I see Frameworks as another layer of abstraction, just like programming languages. And they have the same pros/cons that comes with abstractions.

kohlerm• 4 years ago

Not sure I agree with this . A dependency is a dependency and you should always think about whether you want that dependency. Whether it is a framework or not is not really the important point. The important point is how much does this dependency "lock in". e.g. if inversion of control is a framework "thing", doesn't that in principle minimize the impact of the dependency?

jokull• 4 years ago

The criticism is mainly on last-generation frameworks that came around before React and the like. They bundled together an all-in-one approach to writing web apps. Django comes with an admin tool!

The world has largely moved to richer frontends so stacks are more flexible.

Octabrain• 4 years ago

Disclaimer: I'm a DevOps, not a developer, but enjoy writting software side projects at home where I am free to chose whatever I want and don't suffer from real world engineering decisions. So, take my opinion on this with that in mind.

Traditionally, I've always used Python with whatever framework (Django, Flask, FastAPI) but always had this feeling that I am learning a framework, not digging into the language which is what I would like. Django, for instance: you end up feeling that a big part of it is magical, which is something that I personally dislike.

A few months ago I found Go and fell in love with it's pragmatism and its non-written (as far as I am aware) rule of not relying on frameworks but instead on just libraries. I find it great, but again, I don't have direct experience in the real world to know the trade offs on multiple levels this can bring.

mirzap2• 4 years ago

On contrary. Not using frameworks (when you have need for them) actually means you build 60% of framework your self, and then you have to maintain your app and your framework. Which is waste of time and resources. In my experience as freelance developer the worst project I could possibly get is from people who invent their own "frameworks" (they just call it "lib") because they thought they were smart avoiding frameworks like next.js, laravel or springboot. It is a mess to maintain and to implement anything new on that codebase.

Complaining that framework wont support you forever because you were too lazy to maintain the software incrementally, is like complaining why php 1.0 or why windows 98 is not supported anymore. It simply doesn't make any sense.

My advice was always focus on your product, on your app, use as little dependencies as you can, but do not waste time on things that are solved already. Don't write your own framework to avoid using some other more mature and better maintained framework or lib. Sure you do not need library dependency which will tell you is something boolean or not, but if you need to add router to your app, use the lib.

Kinrany2• 4 years ago

As a freelancer you only see projects that were in bad enough shape that they needed extra help, no?

mirzap2• 4 years ago

Not really. Those bad ones look for outside help when people who maintained all that leave and they don't find in-house devs quickly. Projects that use frameworks tend to maintain opinionated structure that frameworks usually push. Which helps onboarding. Not always, but mostly. And it's always easier to fix and maintain the mess I see for example in a Laravel project, than in built-all-alone project.

0xblinq• 4 years ago

Well said. I've had to suffer those frameworks somebody thought they could do better without them, and it was a disaster. Nobody other than the person that wrote it was happy about it.

makach• 4 years ago

Problem with this statemetn is that it is recursive. Everything you do will end up as some sort of framework and thus, stack overflow achieved.

glroyal2• 4 years ago

I would add that frameworks:

* promote helplessness by abstracting away fundamental but tedious tasks one ought to know how to do,

* erode the capacity for innovation by making it difficult to contemplate or impossible to implement solutions outside the framework's feature set,

* achieve an equilibrium I call 'mutually assured mediocrity' in which a programmer or organization necessarily vows to remain at the same low level of technology as their competitors.

marcus_holmes5• 4 years ago

I've worked on projects that use frameworks, and don't.

My experience:

1. Frameworks do save time at the start of the project. There's lots of stuff that comes for free and it does get the project going faster.

2. Every project that uses a framework (and survives long enough) ends up fighting that framework. And the more comprehensive the framework, the quicker the project reaches this point and the harder the fight is.

3. If the team doesn't know the framework well at the start of the project, most of the speed gains at the start are lost, and most of the issues with the framework later are worse.

In my experience (almost 30 years now), using libraries instead of frameworks gets most of the benefits and stops most of the pain.

mejutoco• 4 years ago

I heard an analogy between writing without a framework / your own framework an nuclear energy that I found fitting (not taking sides either way). Please bear with me.

The best-case scenario is better. More energy in the case of nuclear and just what you need, more performant, less code in the case of no framework. Everything just for your use case and no more.

But the worse-case is much much worse too. If you drop checks and discipline once (key developer switching jobs without in-team knowledge, for instance) there is no way back and the consequences can be catastrophic.

I would conclude than in general it is not worth it, but if you have the discipline and political incentives and/or special requirements (big ifs) it can be worth it, as long as those ifs keep being true.

I guess my insight is: it depends :)

talkingtab• 4 years ago

Complexity. Specifically the complexity of the framework vs the complexity of your need.

Often frameworks/libraries solve the whole problem. For example Oauth. If you want to provide "login with {Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Instagram, etc}. then you must deal with the differences and oddities of each implementation of the service. And all the different modes of "login with" and then keep up to date with changes.

The difference is the same as that between buying a shovel and an excavator. Excavators are fun - at least until you have to fix them - so if you can afford one there is a temptation.

Complexity in software is the product killer. The cost of maintaining ten excavator type solutions can kill your product and your productivity, and can require you to create a maintenance department.

Libraries and Frameworks are always a temptation and often are useful, but understanding the full cost and all the downsides increasingly makes what seems like an obvious choice not so good.

But what if you need only a very basic flow for Github? Do you need that complexity? You may need to expand your solution, so

hnarn• 4 years ago

My main issue with the usage of frameworks is when they are used in a situation where they are clearly not needed. It seems common in my opinion that people who use npm, react etc. as a part of their work -- where we can assume for the sake of argument that it is necessary -- also use these same tools for minor hobby projects they're involved in, where it really wouldn't be necessary.

I've seen more than one "theme" for example for any generic site generator or blogging software that does nothing more than set up some CSS rules, define some views and use some very minor JS for interactivity, but still has a minified output ground through npm with the almost mandatory 200+ dependencies that of course break and cause security warnings over time.

I've also seen entire products written in a framework that seemed invincible in the day it was created, only to be a dinosaur everybody despises five years later when new functionality needs to be added. Frameworks inevitably makes me think of the poem "Ozymandias"[1], they accumulate as dead monuments over time, and it cannot be avoided.

So, what to do? Well, my humble and highly personal opinion is that two thoughts should at least be entertained:

1) Using less code and less infrastructure to "build" it may, for smaller projects, make them a lot more maintainable and robust over time

2) For larger projects, instead of hooking your cart to one framework for everything, focus on separating the functionality into different parts, so that at least when one of your frameworks need to be replaced five years down the road, you can keep using the other separate parts that work fine.

[1]: I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

tootie• 4 years ago

"In other words: enforced standardising the tech, doesn't pay off."

That's a completely different thesis from frameworks are bad. My org uses frameworks extensively and we reevaluate which are fit to purpose at every new project. Rigid enforcement of rules without thoughtful analysis is just a straw man and I've never seen an org that does that.

I'd also just disagree with the rest of the argument. Frameworks provide both speed to market and shared vernacular that makes it easier to onboard team members and find support communities online. I have a small team and some software that is 10+ years old. The maintenance team has turned over 300% since inception. Without a framework we'd be completely lost.

lasereyes136• 4 years ago

Everything or almost everything stated in the article is true. That said, it doesn't matter. All software and software ecosystems are ephemeral and you can't know what you might need or want in the future, especially years down the road. All software lives in a constantly changing world so attempts to manage maintenance needs in the future can be a fools errand.

Yes, decouple your business logic from your frameworks and libraries as much as possible. Don't expect that to make your software more maintainable.

Yes, be aware the using a framework or any technology is coupling, but also be aware that you can't decouple from everything. Make the best decisions you can with the information you have now and have test automation to check for regressions.

fleddr• 4 years ago

It's funny, this divide between the old world and new world.

The old world has a heavy emphasis on computer science itself, theoretical correctness, long term thinking. It has led to the role of the careful software architect, design patterns, UML, the like.

Everything about this old world is a fantasy, as it requires ideal conditions. You'll need low delivery pressure and a homogenous set of well-disciplined high-end engineers.

That's not how software is built these days. You need to ship multiple features per engineer per 2 weeks or so. There's no time to do it the right way. Worse, most programmers are bread programmers and couldn't even grasp deep computer science, most have never studied it. Even better educated engineers compromise due to time pressure. The role of software architect as it was before, barely exists anymore. It's just a senior developer winging it.

In this context, if anything, frameworks aren't opinionated enough. Many don't have "batteries included" leaving unlimited options to screw it up. And the team will screw it up.

Maintenance? The software cycle in some domains, especially web and apps, is so fast that we'll just start over every 3-5 years anyway.

AugustoCAS• 4 years ago

I didn't read the whole article, but I agree in principle.

My rule of thumb is:

* Prefer code vs a library if what I want to do is simple and/or if the complexity of the library overshadows whatever benefit I get from using it. * Prefer a library vs a framework if the library provides what I need.

A couple of examples when using:

* The use of the Spring Framework in the Java world to do DI, web apps and many other things. I think java is the only language where a framework has such a bad influence on developers (maybe Ruby and Rails follows it, after all Spring tried hard to copy Rails ease of use). In this example the framework makes a few things easier, by ading a metric ton of complexity. * The npm left-pad library (debacle).

This doesn't mean that one shouldn't use libraries or frameworks, just that they need to be justified. Development is boring and most developers just see shiny stuff and have to use it in production just to get some entretainment.

eezing• 4 years ago

Not using a framework will harm the maintenance of your software.

_hcuq• 4 years ago

I always preferred libraries. But they don’t seem to exist for web development.

dotxlem• 4 years ago

"[Frameworks] have different goals than you or your team."

Seems like if that's the case, then you've selected the wrong framework more than frameworks as a whole are bad.

ontologiae• 4 years ago

I think most of the problems come from insufficient semantic power of actual language. Most programming language, even the most advanced don't manage time, don't manage locality, and don't fit in the brain representation human makes of the code. It's remarkably explained by Blackwell in his paper "Metaphors we Program By: Space, Action and Society in Java" https://www.ppig.org/papers/2006-ppig-18th-blackwell/

So frameworks try to manage this gap, and the only solution, IMO, is to invent language that integrate more advanced semantics to avoid the necessity of frameworks

night_person• 4 years ago

Whoever insisting promoting building everything from scratch, should try to live with such home grown framework. I saw few times when after building such software, original authors left and you stuck supporting this old crap with usually no documentation. After some time you decided to leave, but your CV does not contain now magic words as Spring, Django, etc.

twhitmore• 4 years ago

I've had extensive experience on both sides of the fence -- working on apps within existing frameworks, and also maintaining custom frameworks & libs for apps using those. Unfortunately I find this article of very little value.

The author's claimed idea of "decoupling from the framework" is generally ineffective & impractical. It leads to extra layers of adapters & SPI with high cost and almost always zero value.

These sure add bloat & make the codebase pointlessly difficult to navigate, but are improbably unlikely to ever add value in allowing the framework to actually be changed.

Difficulties include mismatched abstractions, endless adapter layers, parameter types for methods also all needing to be abstracted, restricted capabilities, difficulty conveying behaviour/ dynamism rather than static values, and -- of course -- poor performance.

Results are severe choke-points hindering functionality, broken abstractions where stuff actually had to be done, and 90% of the SPI abstractions turning out worthless if you ever did try to migrate to another framework.

I'm an architect. I've seen people's non-portable abstractions so many times. The article's advice just seems so unlikely to help.

Pick a framework that offers long-term maintainability and lets you separate out your domain model & business logic, and just code directly in it.

Rather than railing against bad frameworks from limited experience (perhaps in rickety languages too), the author should perhaps spend some time to find a good one. Spring is fine for many purposes. The MVC is coupled at the front, but your domain model need not & should not be. Focus on that, which should be your business value.

pepito_fdez• 4 years ago

So many things wrong with this article...

But I won't comment here. Like a good gladiator, I will eviscerate it on the public square: LinkedIn!

ladyattis• 4 years ago

I think this article sums up my experience with frameworks. It's not to say they're worthless but that if you use them then you should minimize how much you modify them based on your stakeholder feedback. That means communicating to your stakeholders the limitations of the framework and the costs up diverging from the framework's structure to build a feature.

cnokleberg• 4 years ago

I wrote an article for the ACM which covers how Google uses frameworks: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3447806

It discusses many of the same trade-offs, but reaches different conclusions. It is true that frameworks are not for everyone, and their benefits are likely more pronounced in larger organizations.

Using a framework will harm the maintenance of your software

Related Stories