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Obviously, frameworks have some measure of utility, being that so many people use them. Though you give multiple reasons why a person might not use a framework,

Obviously, frameworks have some measure of utility, being that so many people use them. Though you give multiple reasons why a person might not use a framework, you neglect the good points that are obviously making people use them. "Frameworks suck because they are an avatar of enterprise, frameworks suck because they take away your freedom, frameworks suck because they build walls between coders, frameworks suck because they make you fit your project to the toolset rather than the toolset to the project, and frameworks suck because they take the fun out of programming, long live the library." Please answer this: why DO people use frameworks?

ajross 18y ago
Because it's easier at the beginning. Doing a big application from scratch requires doing stuff like requirements analysis, which means you need to understand the universe of tools available to make good decisions. Then you need to prototype for a while before settling on the final design (i.e. your custom framework). With rails (or whatever) you get something that works immediately, which feels safer to a lot of folks who don't have the deep toolkit expertise required above. The problem is that while the framework works, you don't actually understand it any better than you do the toolkits, it's just handling stuff for you with (what you understand as) voodoo. So when it comes time to make big design changes in the future, the toolkit folks know exactly where to start, while the framework people are completely lost. I'm not completely against frameworks, but I've seen so many misused that I'm very wary. A stupidly-applied library is usually a point-source bug that can be fixed in one place. A stupidly-applied framework infects the whole application with its mess.