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Comment by paddy_m | Hacker News Reader

Not mentioned here but important, I strongly prefer and recommend an opinionated framework like django, rails, (possibly ember) over mix match frameworks (express, flask) because they have already thought more about most design decisions than you want to (or your engineers). Especially for an early stage startup, the performance, scalability, or reliability of your stack isn't going to kill you. A long time to market will kill you, reinventing the wheel will kill you. When I see django apps built and developed, a shockingly high amount of effort is dedicated to actually solving business problems vs other less opinionated frameworks.

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I've done a full circle on this one and arrived at -- it depends on the team. Specifically, if you have teammates who know the purpose of these frameworks and all their parts, they might do well with a leaner library based approach. But i've met many devs now -- some much stronger in general than myself -- who I later realized don't actually know why these things exist. So they go without a validation or jobs layer from the start, and then we have to do a bunch of refactoring after a few months. My sniff test is to ask people about ORMs. If the person dislikes ORMs because "I know SQL, I don't need help with it" -- they probably don't know that ORM's _mostly_ exist to provide the common abstractions over SQL you'll inevitably need (or make) in a business logic heavy web app. A more experienced (with web frameworks) dev should use (or not) an ORM for more thoughtful reasons than "I know SQL" or "I used X and it sucked so I'd rather use nothing".

In short I generally agree, but I think some teams (in some contexts) can thoughtfully choose a more lightweight approach.

You are correct about time to market, but in my experience the more a framework does for you, the more friction it will give when you have market validation and need to build out. Keep it simple, use something like next.js, postgres, perhaps a query builder like knex.js and start building. Easy to reason about, massive community to get developers and support. On top of it you can build it all using. TypeScript and quickly refactor and itterate with confidence.

By the time you get to that point, you've won and can afford to hire a team to handle the friction to build out. People scale Rails and Django apps to large customer bases before having to start thinking about how to design for "web scale".

Problem is, you need to figure out a way to send and receive data from the backend (an API), a way to show validation errors, a way to do i18n and translations, a way to access your database (an ORM or similar... no, no raw sql, thanks , a way to do authentication and authorization, an admin or a cms to browse your database,a way to do background jobs or long running tasks, a way to send emails, a way to write CLI maintenance tools, a migrations system, and so many other things I could spend all day talking about.

Of course for a todo list list app or a landing page it is an easier solution, but real world applications need a lot more things you'll have to figure out by yourself. I'm telling you this from my own experience with Next. What we used to give for granted with Django suddenly we found out we had to rewrite a TON of code ourselves, and glue togheter many libraries of varying quality and maintenance, and the result wasn't much better or documented or performant or enjoyable as what django used to provide us with.

Another huge advantage of opinionated frameworks is that someone who knows the framework will know how to navigate a new codebase day one. As a consultant, I've seen this countless times. So much so that unless I'm working on a pet project I like to stick to as much of a 'plain vanilla', idiomatic use of an opinionated framework like Rails or Django as possible.

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