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I used to write a bunch of ExtJS. The whole abstraction bothered me so much that I wrote a whole post about it. http://mumbledrantings.blogspot.com/2010/04/rea
by trjordan 12y ago
I used to write a bunch of ExtJS. The whole abstraction bothered me so much that I wrote a whole post about it.
http://mumbledrantings.blogspot.com/2010/04/reaching-utopia-and-why-its-not.html http://mumbledrantings.blogspot.com/2010/04/reaching-utopia-...
The tl;dr version is that it's so good at building complex things that it hides none of the complexity. Instead of learning about the interesting system of JS + HTML + CSS + server interactions, you let ExtJS handle the interactions and specific everything in massive arrays. And that exercise bores me out of my damn mind.
- x86_64Ubuntu 12y agoIf I'm writing an app, I'm doing it to deliver something. If I want some zen-like learning experience I know where to get it, and prefer that the ugly inner working stay out of my immediate workflow.
- trjordan 12y agoSure, in the short term. I generally find that understanding the system (or building abstractions that cover the complex system in sensible ways), you find ways to solve problems more elegantly. Put another way, in building an app, I always learn something about my original vision of the app that was wrong, and needs correcting. ExtJS doesn't help with that iteration loop: I just create hard-to-debug things that do exactly what I want when I finally get them working. The rubber of your ideas meeting the road of the complex system is an important step in creating a better app, and papering over the system ignores that step.