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Frameworks come and go. Languages come and go (albeit at a slower pace). But the basics do not change. Why be bitter about frameworks? Yesterday's succesful

Frameworks come and go. Languages come and go (albeit at a slower pace). But the basics do not change. Why be bitter about frameworks? Yesterday's succesful frameworks (Struts anyone?) are today's shame. And today's succesful frameworks are today's shame (including the ones plagued with countless security issues). Frameworks and APIs are easy to learn. Learning the basics is hard. Norvig's idea is that to be an expert in any domain you basically need to spend ten years learning it. Why spend ten years learning frameworks? They'll be gone by the time you master them (ok, I'm exaggerating a bit). Focus your time and energy on the invariants: learn the things that still shall be there and shall still be true in ten years. I honestly have no fear and no bitterness about the ones amongst the youngsters who can only glue together frameworks and APIs without understanding what's going on behind the hood: they'll never be a match for the ones who understand the basics (both older programmers and youngster ones who realize there's much more to programming than being able to do API/framework plumbing).

mattgreenrocks 14y ago
There's a pop engineering mindset that surrounds framework hype, often parading under the label of YAGNI. It wears the banner of "write your application completely within this nice container, and we'll do everything for you!" Never mind that the framework ends up being more useful when you push on it, not the other way around.
SkyMarshal 14y ago
Indeed, my first manager after college taught me something I still remember - programming is trendy. The same fundamental concepts keep getting reimplemented every 5-10 years, hopefully in some new-and-improved way but not necessarily. It behooves professionals to have some deep grounding in the fundamental, enduring concepts to be able to evaluate that.

mattgreenrocks 14y ago

There's a pop engineering mindset that surrounds framework hype, often parading under the label of YAGNI. It wears the banner of "write your application completely within this nice container, and we'll do everything for you!" Never mind that the framework ends up being more useful when you push on it, not the other way around.

SkyMarshal 14y ago

Indeed, my first manager after college taught me something I still remember - programming is trendy. The same fundamental concepts keep getting reimplemented every 5-10 years, hopefully in some new-and-improved way but not necessarily. It behooves professionals to have some deep grounding in the fundamental, enduring concepts to be able to evaluate that.