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by rmrfrmrf 4522 days ago
One of my first full PHP projects was a WordPress site. I was very inexperienced at the time, but I remember being frustrated at the concept of the Loop, sub-queries, template overrides, and the like. IMO beginners should work without frameworks so that they know what's part of the language and what's part of the framework, especially when the framework has its own idioms and opinions about proper development.
2 comments
lmm 4522 days ago
That sounds more like a case of a bad framework (and bad language) than an argument against frameworks in general. Even if you only ever use a language's standard library, different projects will use different parts of it, so there's always going to be some new things to learn when switching projects.

Use an environment that matches what you want to learn, and one that promotes good development practices. But given how much modern programming is framework-based, that likely means using a framework.

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scarecrowbob 4522 days ago
Just to a offer an alternate experience, many of my first programming projects were implemented in wordPress.

These projects allowed me the opportunity to work on smaller subsets of problems than implementing a full-on CMS would have exposed me to as well as exposing me to many, many patterns I never would have encountered if I had to invent my own.

It was much more instructive to me to have to fix a small bug or implement a small feature that it would have been if I had to implement everything from the bottom up. I was also frustrated by many things in WP, but I believe that I could have been just as frustrated at any number of things in any system: that's just part of learning.

That said, I have always really enjoyed programming, and so the bad patterns and poor design choices that I see in wordPress weren't a big limitation on my learning, and I have since worked on a lot of of different systems, many of which have added new idioms to how I express myself in code.

I can see how people I know and work with don't progress very far in their programming skills because they can rely on frameworks or other code that they don't understand. But I have learned a whole lot by copying other folks' idioms.

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