Real programmers don’t use frameworks

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Cool your jets! This article isn’t suggesting we abolish frameworks. They are a critical part of modern software engineering. To not use them would require us to repeat the same task multiple times, creating complex code from scratch.

Leveraging a framework, such as Spring or React, lets us overlook boilerplate, configuration and all the fundamentals of a contemporary app or server. They provide consistency, standards and reduction in visible code, perhaps at the expense of performance. With them, we can concentrate on the business logic, the real problem, the fun stuff.

Frameworks get a bad rap, notably in the JavaScript world, where it seems that every other week there is a new framework. Arguments abound regarding which one to use, and “experts” declare each as dead, yet they continue to be used by tens of thousands of websites or apps.

There is a real danger, though, when you integrate with code that likely you don’t understand. I question if senior engineers, or even those more experienced, comprehend more than a fraction of how a framework does what it does. We all grasp the important fundamentals, and even specifics of what we use frequently, perhaps config, or security, but who here has been bitten by an obscure part of a framework that no one realized had a side effect?