How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love Newbies

The anger directed at highly-abstracted frameworks is typically rooted in fear. Specifically, fear that someone less expensive, with less education and ancillary knowledge could one day replace them in the marketplace.

There's a reason a significant portion of the community doesn't actually want coding and basic CS know-how to become highly commoditized. It's a sentiment rarely expressed in so many words, but it's most certainly there.

While there's no doubt that the job market will look significantly different 5-10 years from now, I for one choose to remain optimistic. The ever increasing levels of abstraction come hand in hand with ever increasing levels of complexity - complexity that someone with a genuinely deep skill set is poised to cater to.

Not to belabor the point, but another commenter pointed out that web frameworks have made "old school" web developers somewhat obsolete - and yet there's not exactly a shortage of demand for competent web developers in 2012.

I doubt many framework creators intended the framework to be a substitute for learning the actual language. They're usually built to help with code organization, reduce boring repetitive work, deal with cross-platform glitches, etc.

It's difficult when you first start, though, because it can be confusing to know the difference between a language and a framework. Especially so in native GUI development, in my opinion. But I think whether people start off with a framework or not, eventually they can wind up in the same place. Because frameworks are often built using good practices, so the newbie learns good habits, and has to fill in their language gaps. Someone who starts with fundamentals may not know how to organize code until they discover some frameworks.

It's a good point. Even a great programmer can have trouble when moving in to a new language and work flow, and needs to ask for help. Or, some people new to programming could be extremely good in the future, but just need a little help to get going.

I agree its always hard to see part of your skillset to be commodotized by others. Some can escape it by re-focusing on what cannot be commodotized (true, unique design/UX over Bootstrap, performance-optimzed backend over Parse), but just think about what frameworks did to old-school web-developers. A majority of the time and skills is now easily replaced by frameworks such as Rails etc.

Why wouldn't you start off with sensible defaults and then customize to achieve your vision? That's not the realm of newbies, it's just common sense. This post reads to me like a back-handed compliment. Given that only dummies use stuff like this, he admits that at times we are all dummies, so let's take it easier on the dummies. It's a false premise.

It's a tough balance between the high level tools acting as a crutch you never get rid of, and having to know all of the technical details in the lower levels.