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Comment by reillyse | Hacker News Reader

Yea it’s nonsense. Factories are fantastic. If you want to do something as a hobby, sure don’t use the most advanced tools and do it by hand, but for everyone else especially professionals who are charging other people for their time and effort using the best possible tooling is essential.

In fact, if somebody didn’t use a common library or framework and instead “rolled their own” it’s downright irresponsible, obnoxiously egotistical and just creates a huge maintenance burden for whoever has to maintain it when you move on.

Take for example a crud app in ruby. If instead of using rails or another framework you instead “rolled your own” for one it would take you way longer for two it would never be as battle tested as the framework and lastly you are guaranteeing that whoever has to maintain it will need to learn the idiosyncrasies of your amazing implementation with zero outside help. It’s a recipe for disaster.

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I use the same argument for IDEs versus fancy text editors like EMACS. Sure, you might prefer the specific keyboard shortcuts, but IDEs objectively make developers more productive through features like source code integration, debuggers, and refactoring capabilities.

Use whatever you like on your home projects, but at work you should be using whatever is most efficient.

And interestingly, your argument also falls apart in the same way as the framework argument. It might make the average developer more productive on an average project. But most projects are not average, and neither are most developers. Everyone has some unique combination of strengths, just like every project has special cases that don’t fit within the box of a framework.

A framework is great if you don’t know much about the domain and just want to get something together quickly. But if you’re working on anything novel, then eventually you’ll bump against the walls of the framework. Hopefully you designed the project in such a way that you can break out of the framework for these inevitable special cases.

And I like frameworks! I’ve used a few in various languages and think they do a good job organizing the code for the basic cases. But every professional project I’ve worked on has eventually been trapped by piling workarounds on top of the framework to make it work for some unsupported or complex case, or an inevitable architecture fail which the framework has not considered an escape hatch for.

Just like developers and their tools. I have an IDE and nvim at work. The IDE has a lot of power for major refactoring and hinting features, and it’s reasonable enough for an untrained dev.

But it is very slow for the other 99.8% of my job where I’m not doing a big “find and rename all instances”. I am usually wading through a large project and jumping between files to try to understand a complex system. Once I understand it, I’m jumping between those files again to make my changes. All of that is much faster in a lightweight editor than an IDE. But I still open up the IDE every now and then to double-check some change that I made, or do those big fancy refactors.

> But most projects are not average

I call bullshit. Most projects are average by definition. Otherwise that wouldn’t be the average.

You could argue that it's specifically true for projects, but the definition of average absolutely doesn't require that.

If for example you had 100 projects were 50 of them were built by expert teams who poured love into their work, and 50 were made by 12 year olds who spent one day on their projects before giving up, the "average" quality of the 100 would be a long way from either the great or the shit products.

Likewise if a group of ten people has five CEOs earning a million a year, and five waiters earning minimum wage including tips, none of the ten are "by definition" earning half a million a year.

Of course in my data sets there is a kind of "normal distribution" such that most objects are near the mean, but that needs to be found out not assumed.

I have no idea how many tech products are near the mean as opposed to near one extreme or the other, and doubt anyone could guess without bias and without actually researching the question.

I have a fairly high confidence it’s normally distributed.

Of course me having confidence doesn’t really mean anything, but I’ll work off that assumption anyway.

I think you're probably right, was just pointing out that the definition doesn't mean that has to be the case :)

Fair enough

> Most projects are average by definition. Otherwise that wouldn’t be the average.

You're assuming outliers in both directions don't dominate the process.

As an example, let's say we have 10 projects, that have some property that can be rated on a scale from 1-10. Difficulty to accomplish is the first thing coming to mind. If we have 5 projects that are a 1 on this scale, and 5 projects that are a 10, the average is going to be 5.5 despite none of the projects being anywhere close to that.

There’s way too much variance in projects for the average to be meaningful, in my opinion. They will have some or many average parts, but they will also have some number of parts that are special.

It might be normally distributed, but across tens/hundreds/thousands of dimensions. For example, some axes might be

* resource usage requirements * latency * persistent storage options (filesystem/SQL/Redis) * concurrency needs * UI options * error handling technique * etc, etc

Like, if you want a terminal-based UI and don’t need SQL access, then you definitely shouldn’t use Ruby on Rails.

Some of those dimensions are obvious at the start of a project but some aren’t. You might not find out until later that you need something that your framework doesn’t support. And when that happens, you can end up in a situation of hacking together the feature working around the framework, especially if there’s a deadline.

Like I said, frameworks are great if you are very careful with their limitations.

It's a really weird sentence. I think most people would consider IDEs are the "fancy" ones, compared to emacs. I have to read your comment 3 times to ensure I didn't read it wrong.

Plus the comparison doesn't work at all. When you use your home-made framework to solve a common problem, you make it harder to maintain for others. When you use emacs you use emacs.

Emacs and IDEs are tools, but frameworks and libraries (and programming languages) are not merely tools. They're tools AND raw materials.

> Use whatever you like on your home projects, but at work you should be using whatever is most efficient.

Where's the incentive to do the latter?

> fancy text editors like EMACS.

Them fighting words my friend.

I knew mentioning EMACS would get the HN crowd riled up, that's the point. :)

For laughs: Interview with an Emacs Enthusiast in 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urcL86UpqZc

And to keep things fair and balanced, an Interview with a VIM Enthusiast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9n1dtmzqnCU

"I actually wrote a vim versus IDE comparison. Do you know how much faster vim was? 4.3 seconds! 4.3 seconds I saved every day! All those months learning were totally worth it."

My experience with having to use Spring Boot everywhere is that the amount of effort involved in debugging Spring Boot problems is hardly worth the benefit of avoiding the minimal glue code to call some database or pass around some object. But hey, some dentist said this toothpaste is the toothpaste to end all toothpastes...

What with Google and now GPT, it's critical that your framework is well talked about on the internet. Otherwise searching "show me some code to do XYZ using the frankenframework" will come up empty and then it's game over for your framework.

That makes building your own framework even less of a good idea than it used to be.

OTOH, if you build a framework/library, you might be able to use AI to generate thousands of examples of using your framework/library, then publish those examples. If it's too difficult for the AI to generate correct examples, then that may be a sign of what parts would also be difficult for humans.

We may in fact see an explosion of new frameworks and libraries that use this strategy.

Yes.

Which is bad on some level. It'll bring the mediocrity of frameworks, since there's no reason to adopt or create anything new.

Agreed. "I hate frameworks, so I rolled my own shittier framework"

To be fair this is from 2005 so frameworks were less composition based.

But yeah, HN has been full of noobs for a while. In both a technical and epistemological sense.

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