Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

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This is why I love opinionated frameworks, why I love hand-holding tutorials, why I love abstractions. I don’t like code. I don’t like writing it, I don’t like reading it, I don’t like thinking about it. A mechanic doesn’t love his crescent wrench, he loves working on engines. The wrench is just a tool. What I enjoy is the final product and seeing a project come together as time goes on.

“The right tool for the job” doesn’t matter for most regular CRUD boring programming work. Django vs Rails vs a huge bundle of JS libraries cobbled together at random... for most programming work it doesn’t matter. So why not pick the one that lets you get your job done the quickest and easiest?

I get nothing (nothing but added stress) from trying new frameworks and new libraries and new packages constantly. I want to learn the right way to do something and then get down to business. My boss and my stakeholders don’t care what language or framework I’m using. The only consideration I need is “how quickly and easily can I get this done” and to be honest most of the time that’s Rails.

These days I’m using AWS Amplify which is an opinionated framework for AWS serverless apps and that’s all I really want... someone to make the “right” decisions for me so I can get my own work done. Because my job isn’t to pick languages and frameworks, it’s to produce a finished product.

I feel the same way about rust’s standard lib, which is pretty sparse compared to, say, python and go. Finding libraries for common tasks is the most stressful part of an otherwise stress-free language (first world problems, I know). I get that it’s a trade off, and I get why the designers chose this path, but I would have preferred it the other way.

I use Go pretty regularly and I feel this. I had to choose a CLI framework and was bombarded by 10 different options all with wildly different designs to choose from. The flipside of this is Go's old errors library which lacked so much functionality that people standardized on an open source package.

> Django vs Rails vs a huge bundle of JS libraries cobbled together at random... for most programming work it doesn’t matter.

It might not matter to you, but it sure matters for the end user.

This sort of attitude is why blog pages weigh north of 20 Mb and load for minutes nowadays.

You read the absolute wrong conclusion from that statement. Hint: Django and Rails are not front end frameworks and you can definitely use them to serve 20mb front ends too.

If mechanics didn't love their wrenches, companies like Snap-on tools wouldn't exist. Where you get the same thing as a good tool at a big box store, but for 5x the price.

Snap-Ons business model isn’t the high quality of their tools, it’s their financing. I have a mechanic friend who is over $7,000 in debt to Snap On. They’ll finance just about anyone who has a job.

If you don't like code you don't become a developer.

If you hate wrenches you're going to have a .. difficult time being a mechanic.

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