7 ms·

> Every sufficiently complex framework-free application contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a framework. This

by hsn915 4y ago

> Every sufficiently complex framework-free application contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a framework. This is simply false. On the other hand, every sufficiently complex framework-dependant application is way too complex for what it does, and would be a lot simpler if it was not using said framework. > My last and--to me the most significant--observation is this: You want to pay the majority of your attention to the code that has the greatest impact on your desired outcomes. One of your greatest desires should be to have strong propietry technology that you control. Otherwise you are not different from anyone, and anyone can duplicate your work in two months by just using the same framework.

matthewmacleod 4y ago
No, it's not "simply false". It's something that many of us have repeatedly observed happening and probably done ourselves at some point. There are of course exceptions, but it's not really fair to bluntly dismiss it. One of your greatest desires should be to have strong propietry technology that you control Yes – and you should be investing your time in making that "strong proprietary technology" more effective, and spending as little time as possible doing all the bits that your competitors didn't have to do because they picked an off-the-shelf solution that did most of it to a "good enough" level.
- hsn915 4y ago
  This notion that frameworks save you time is just ridicluous. Unless the framework is doing something really complicated and difficult (like, say, a 3D game engine such as the Unreal Engine), chances are it's costing you time and effort. What often ends up happening is you have to do a lot of useless work to get around the limitation of the framework you decided to use at the start. Since most people on HN are in the web space, framework often refers to things like "Django" or "Redux". These beats always cost way more than they provide. For a web server, a library like the standard "net/http" in Go is way more useful than a "framework".
  - tbrownaw 4y ago
    > This notion that frameworks save you time is just ridicluous. Unless the framework is doing something really complicated and difficult (like, say, a 3D game engine such as the Unreal Engine), chances are it's costing you time and effort. ... Have you ever written a simple web app? Pull values from a db and present them somehow? Having something that just gives me places to plug in the business logic makes this pretty trivial.
    - hsn915 4y ago
      > Have you ever written a simple web app? Pull values from a db and present them somehow? Yes I have. A lot.
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    Are we all talking past each other? IME there is a time for using an off-the-shelf framework and a time to hand roll from scratch. (For varying definitions of scratch.) Generally when a company's tech needs aren't very unique, and they seek to compete on time to market, then a shelf framework makes sense. Companies whose needs stretch the boundaries of shelf frameworks too much may be better served by building on a lower level platform like from a standard library--entirely or in part. Yet building from scratch is costly. Depending on the stack / language chosen it may cost an "innovation token" or three. Small companies can't afford a lot of these tokens. And lots of eager engineers want to believe their problems are unique, dragons never before defeated. IME most problems aren't like that. They're boring, such as a codebase that's lost its fit as the market or company has grown, pivoted, or contracted.
  - megaman821 4y ago
    I remember people saying this in a PHP days and almost without fail their code would be littered with security bugs. They don't a template language, and there would be a XSS vulnerability. They don't need an ORM, and there would be a SQL injection vulnerability. They don't need a form library, and there would be a CSRF vulnerability. Now-a-days there are less security vulnerabilities and more buggy messes powered by Express.JS. API's with shitty query string parsers than crash the server. The average developer should just be using a framework.
zdragnar 4y ago
Avoiding the use of a framework does not preclude someone else from duplicating your work in two months by using a framework. It just means that you wasted a whole lot of time hand-rolling things that didn't need hand-rolling. Most businesses are not successful by virtue of the technologies they choose. Facebook is probably the foremost example here; they started with PHP and moved over time to leverage additional technologies (some homegrown like hack and react, others just additional languages like C++). There are plenty of facebook clones in plenty of languages. The technology isn't the reason Facebook hasn't been supplanted by a competitor with the exact same product.

by hsn915 4y ago

matthewmacleod 4y ago

No, it's not "simply false". It's something that many of us have repeatedly observed happening and probably done ourselves at some point. There are of course exceptions, but it's not really fair to bluntly dismiss it. One of your greatest desires should be to have strong propietry technology that you control Yes – and you should be investing your time in making that "strong proprietary technology" more effective, and spending as little time as possible doing all the bits that your competitors didn't have to do because they picked an off-the-shelf solution that did most of it to a "good enough" level.

hsn915 4y ago
This notion that frameworks save you time is just ridicluous. Unless the framework is doing something really complicated and difficult (like, say, a 3D game engine such as the Unreal Engine), chances are it's costing you time and effort. What often ends up happening is you have to do a lot of useless work to get around the limitation of the framework you decided to use at the start. Since most people on HN are in the web space, framework often refers to things like "Django" or "Redux". These beats always cost way more than they provide. For a web server, a library like the standard "net/http" in Go is way more useful than a "framework".
- tbrownaw 4y ago
  > This notion that frameworks save you time is just ridicluous. Unless the framework is doing something really complicated and difficult (like, say, a 3D game engine such as the Unreal Engine), chances are it's costing you time and effort. ... Have you ever written a simple web app? Pull values from a db and present them somehow? Having something that just gives me places to plug in the business logic makes this pretty trivial.
  - hsn915 4y ago
    > Have you ever written a simple web app? Pull values from a db and present them somehow? Yes I have. A lot.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Are we all talking past each other? IME there is a time for using an off-the-shelf framework and a time to hand roll from scratch. (For varying definitions of scratch.) Generally when a company's tech needs aren't very unique, and they seek to compete on time to market, then a shelf framework makes sense. Companies whose needs stretch the boundaries of shelf frameworks too much may be better served by building on a lower level platform like from a standard library--entirely or in part. Yet building from scratch is costly. Depending on the stack / language chosen it may cost an "innovation token" or three. Small companies can't afford a lot of these tokens. And lots of eager engineers want to believe their problems are unique, dragons never before defeated. IME most problems aren't like that. They're boring, such as a codebase that's lost its fit as the market or company has grown, pivoted, or contracted.
- megaman821 4y ago
  I remember people saying this in a PHP days and almost without fail their code would be littered with security bugs. They don't a template language, and there would be a XSS vulnerability. They don't need an ORM, and there would be a SQL injection vulnerability. They don't need a form library, and there would be a CSRF vulnerability. Now-a-days there are less security vulnerabilities and more buggy messes powered by Express.JS. API's with shitty query string parsers than crash the server. The average developer should just be using a framework.

zdragnar 4y ago

Avoiding the use of a framework does not preclude someone else from duplicating your work in two months by using a framework. It just means that you wasted a whole lot of time hand-rolling things that didn't need hand-rolling. Most businesses are not successful by virtue of the technologies they choose. Facebook is probably the foremost example here; they started with PHP and moved over time to leverage additional technologies (some homegrown like hack and react, others just additional languages like C++). There are plenty of facebook clones in plenty of languages. The technology isn't the reason Facebook hasn't been supplanted by a competitor with the exact same product.