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Comment by capkutay | Hacker News Reader

This. If you are doing your own side project, building your own framework is a great way to sharpen your core software engineering skills.

If you are architecting a product meant to scale, choosing a framework with significant mindshare, great documentation, and tons of learning materials and blogs supporting it is the right way to go. Frameworks are also supported by other frameworks. React/Redux has popular tools for debugging, logging, asynchronous operations, server-side rendering. I'm sure there are similar angular ecosystem frameworks as well.

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The mindshare bit is an interesting one.

I once read an article [1] that argued Lisp did not reach the same level of industrial popularity as other programming languages due to the fact that Lisp enables you to program in a lot of different ways for different reasons. I'm admittedly not very familiar with Lisp, and I don't know if I fully agree with the article, but it made me wonder if ease-of-collaboration can be considered a useful perk for languages/frameworks.

[1] http://locklessinc.com/articles/why_lisp_failed/

I see parallels to PHP initially taking off for web development instead of Python via mod_python. Paradoxically, it was so much fun to build your own web framework in Python that everyone did, so none got enough traction.

By the time Django finally broke through, PHP (with a good-enough mini-framework baked in) already dominated Python for web development, and the fragmentation of the Python world was arguably a contributing factor. Others adopted a third language because of a single mindshare-heavy framework, Rails.

php was explicitly designed as a way to make dynamic web pages. it evolved from effort to achieve that goal.

mod_python didnt come around until 2000. by then php4 was already out

PHP was never explicitly designed.

semantics? php wasnt written to be a programming language. it was words written with an explicit purpose.

No, read the history of PHP. It started out as just a hack for a school assignment. It accumulated hacks to do different things over time. It didn't ever have an explicit design effort until way long after it had been adopted around the world and they decided they might try to make up for some of it's cruft.

ok so it is semantics. replace design with written.

It's only semantics if you believe "intelligent design" is a thing, or that evolution "wants" anything.

... it made me wonder if ease-of-collaboration can be considered a useful perk for languages/frameworks.

You could make a fair argument that ease of collaboration is the useful perk for the kinds of framework we’re discussing here.

In most cases, these frameworks don’t offer radical new functionality, but they do provide a focal point for developers interested in similar functionality.

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