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It is still a poor analogy, and the fact that a better analogy undermines the original point should suggest that the original point is flawed. Saying "I need a

by ttymck 5y ago

It is still a poor analogy, and the fact that a better analogy undermines the original point should suggest that the original point is flawed. Saying "I need a hammer" and reaching for a house frame is a poor choice. Saying "I want something simple that will just work" and reaching for a framework is the root of the author's woes. They don't even explain what the specific technical grievances are, it's just one drawn out analogy. If they want a hammer to build a house, they'll need a screwdriver, and tape measure, and a table saw. They looked at a few toolkit options on the shelf, got tired of reading the instructions, and ranted. To be fair, I'm sure frameworks in 2005 _were_ cumbersome. (I'm frustrated enough using Spring in 2021, but I still recognize that it's a fully featured house frame ready to go)

lliamander 5y ago
The analogy just makes so much intuitive sense to me that I may be having a "curse of knowledge" thing in trying to explain it to people who don't get it. In thinking about your response I think I may not have explained the author's analogy correctly. Let me try and correct that to see if things make sense. The hammer here is not meant to be analogous to a framework. The hammer here is just supposed to be some sort of functionality provided by the framework. It is the store that is supposed to be the analog to a framework. Just like a hardware store provides tools, a framework is supposed to provide a collection of related pieces of functionality. The point the author was making was that the frameworks available at the time would never just provide you the functionality in any sort of direct way (i.e. selling you a hammer). Instead, those frameworks were all about providing users with a generic set of abstractions for building or configuring the functionality you needed (i.e. a hammer factory). Let's keep in mind that this is 2005, barely a year after the initial release of both Ruby on Rails and Maven, two pieces of software which which would later popularize the notion of "Convention over Configuration". At that point frameworks (especially Java frameworks) were generally these hideous, over-engineered, design-by-committee monstrosities. The fact that Ruby on Rails and Maven went on to be wildly successful is in fact a vindication of the point the author was making.

by ttymck 5y ago

lliamander 5y ago

The analogy just makes so much intuitive sense to me that I may be having a "curse of knowledge" thing in trying to explain it to people who don't get it. In thinking about your response I think I may not have explained the author's analogy correctly. Let me try and correct that to see if things make sense. The hammer here is not meant to be analogous to a framework. The hammer here is just supposed to be some sort of functionality provided by the framework. It is the store that is supposed to be the analog to a framework. Just like a hardware store provides tools, a framework is supposed to provide a collection of related pieces of functionality. The point the author was making was that the frameworks available at the time would never just provide you the functionality in any sort of direct way (i.e. selling you a hammer). Instead, those frameworks were all about providing users with a generic set of abstractions for building or configuring the functionality you needed (i.e. a hammer factory). Let's keep in mind that this is 2005, barely a year after the initial release of both Ruby on Rails and Maven, two pieces of software which which would later popularize the notion of "Convention over Configuration". At that point frameworks (especially Java frameworks) were generally these hideous, over-engineered, design-by-committee monstrosities. The fact that Ruby on Rails and Maven went on to be wildly successful is in fact a vindication of the point the author was making.