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by lisper 841 days ago
Just because something is designed to be used by other people doesn't mean it's good. There are lots of things designed to be used by other people, leading to all of the features you list: documentation, community, other people finding bugs, yada yada yada... languages, operating systems, libraries... and many of those things still suck. There is nothing inherent about being designed for use by other people that makes things suck less, and there is nothing magical about "frameworks" that makes them suck less than all the other stuff designed to be used by other people but still sucks.

If you qualify this advice to the point where it actually becomes useful it turns into, "Use code written by other people that doesn't suck." And that, of course, is indeed a good idea, but it's a lot easier said than done.
1 comments
zubairshaik 840 days ago
Absolutely; most frameworks will not fulfill their design goal. Most ambitious open source programming efforts tend to wither away due to loss of interest, a failure to gain contributors, lack of experience, lack of time or energy and many other factors.

But despite that caveat, there do exist frameworks out there today that speed up development for some developers. Whether one has the time or energy or will to audit them to find one that works best for them (or learn that none of them do) is up to the individual.

I bring this up because many of us on this website are at times infected by NIH syndrome and think we can do better than a dedicated team of experienced front-end developers. And it's likely true for many frameworks, but not all. Additionally, we may want to extend that attitude to our workplace where our peers and bosses likely value development speed and cross-project consistency over code performance.

I used to eschew any and all frameworks, but now I realize that my values have changed. Projects like Svelte give me hope for a better future for front-end development.

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lisper 840 days ago
> But despite that caveat, there do exist frameworks out there today that speed up development for some developers.

Of course. But there also exist frameworks that will slow development down. For any X in {frameworks, languages, operating systems, libraries} there exist X's that will be helpful and X's that will not, and so "use an X" by itself is not helpful advice for any X. You have to use a good X, but that isn't helpful either because it just begs the question.

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zubairshaik 840 days ago
Absolutely true.

I just intended to push back against the notion that frameworks should not be considered.

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