Thread: General Discussion on Frameworks.

Originally Posted by Lesshardtofind

I apoligize for calling you out directly Deathshadow

Hey, I know I'm the bull in a china shop; say what you think. For all my sturm and vehemence, it's ok for us to disagree. Nobody can see things in the same light.

Originally Posted by Lesshardtofind

I'm sorry to say this, but if you as a programmer don't understand WHY jQuery is powerful then there is still alot of growing to do as a programmer.

That or we simply have different definition of "powerful". A ball and chain makes a really powerful flail, doesn't mean it'll get you far with it bolted around your ankle.

@Fellgall actually it no MOST of why I don't consider jQuery powerful, or helpful, or easier, or any of the dozens of other ridiculous and unfounded bits of praise heaped on it.

Originally Posted by felgall

I lost count years ago of the number of times I saw requests for help with 20 lines of jQuery code that didn't work that could have been done in less than 10 lines without jQuery.

That goes double for bootstrap? In the handful of years since people started using bootstrap, I've watched peope go from using 30-50k of bloated markup to doubling that amount, STILL writing the same amount of their own custom CSS, and THEN making these wild claims that more code, more complex codes, and code that is an accessibility disaster was "easier" to work with.

Originally Posted by Lesshardtofind

and understanding that there is no reason to redo the work that someone has already done.

Assuming the other dev did it right, or that using their way involves writing more code on your part than it would be without it.

Though I think we're getting down to the meat of our disagreement on the topic.

Originally Posted by Lesshardtofind

At some point I cling in my soul to the idea that maybe JUST maybe you don't actually hate frameworks and the idea of creating re-usable code,but the thing you don't like is people using and writing bad code.

Unfortunately thanks to EVERY framework I've ever looked at the two seem inseparable... on WEBSITES; we'll get to that shortly here as it's the crux of why we're seeing things differently!

Originally Posted by Lesshardtofind

1. Google.com (built on the internal framework known as google web server built internally but still a framework)
2. Wiki (built on MediaWiki also a interally project but is a framework in itself and is open source)

Just because someone built a system using an internal standard does NOT make it a "framework".

Originally Posted by Lesshardtofind

3. CraigsList (bult on apache, google plugins/libraries, and your favorite jQuery)

... and you didn't read my compaint abou them going and pissing their own bed... and really? Now you're calling apache a "framework"? WOW. Just.. wow. So now any piece of software used to serve websites is a framework? That seems to be where you're going.

Originally Posted by Lesshardtofind

You have presented the ability to be extremely judgmental about all code that is presented to you and all frameworks mentioned as if you have the ability to write and create something in a shorter amount of time without having to work at it all.

It's called critical thinking. I realize in this age of namby pamby "wah wah, somebodiez saids somtings negatives" that such trains of thought are actively discouraged; molly coddling the feeble minded as it were with the "give them all trophies" mentality ... but really if something is wrong we need to point it out.

See those code blocks I posted in my previous posts? Do you know what's wrong with those? It sounds like you don't.

Originally Posted by Lesshardtofind

You also haven't shown an example of an open source library you have written in which you have recognized this problem, solved it, and provided a way to share this information with the community.

I actually have one but it's currently under revision or simply being killed off as a bad idea; the reason being I tend to only pick and choose at most a dozen of the functions from it, none of which would constitute a 'framework' since it's just helpers and missing functionality, not "creating the entire programming model you're supposed to follow to build things".

Originally Posted by Lesshardtofind

JavaScript itself is a framework

... and there it is; Wow, just wow. REALLY? So now programming languages are "frameworks" too? Ok, now I'm starting to think you don't even know what a framework IS.

Sorry, but that's... In some three and a half decades of writing software... I just... I lack the words in polite company.

Originally Posted by Lesshardtofind

If we as a whole avoided frameworks then JavaScript itself wouldn't exist we'd still be pounding away with 0s and 1s.

As someone who ACTUALLY "pounded away with 0's and 1's" entering it 8 bits at a time on toggle switches, you are either talking out your backside, or have no clue what a framework is and what not only distinguishes it from a library, but also from a programming language.

Originally Posted by Lesshardtofind

The ability to look at a piece of code you already wrote and ask a few questions such as "How can this break?", "What can I do to make this more DRY (do not repeat yourself)", and "How can I leverage this to help other programmers" is an insurmountably quality skill that will continue to grow the community as a whole.

True, but I don't see how any of these "frameworks" play into that as they are broken before people even use them in terms of mindset and methodology, DO make people repeat themselves and/or create more work, and to be brutally frank are not "helping other programmers" in the slightest.

Originally Posted by Lesshardtofind

To the point of frameworks being not only extremely powerful, but absolutely necessary for a career in the industry today I will provide a couple examples.

Ooh, you mean for the first time in EIGHT YEARS someone is going to respond with actual examples?

I had this huge breakdown written up of what you linked to, but with the 20k post limit I cut it out -- mostly because I started to notice somethign.

Everything you pointed at was a web application, NOT a website! You also seemed to be referring to things that aren't frameworks (node.js, threejs) as being frameworks. Uhm... no, just no. It think that may be where we're really disagreeing here; you're applying the term framework with a very wide broad brush to things I'd NEVER call a framework! That's not what framework means. You are also coming at it from the point of view of building crapplets, not websites.

[i]crapplet is not ENTIRELY derogatory, the term has been around since when Visual Basic came along to refer to anything slapped together quickly in a WYSIWYG as what should have been a throwaway one-off, that somehow companies became dependent on screwing them in the long-term. Any short/small codebase application running atop a massive slow support structure -- .NET, Java, massive DLL's, node.js, browser engines -- qualifies as a crapplet -- whether they are actually crap or not. Though a LOT of them are.

Originally Posted by Lesshardtofind

but the idea that you actually take these ideas that are 100% not commercially viable in the industry today and try to aggressively enforce them on people who are genuinely coming to this board in an attempt to learn what they could improve is beyond offensive.

If I'm being offensive, it's as a response to things I find highly offensive, like nube after nube having smoke blown up their arse by frameworks like jQuery that result in them working harder, not smarter, and telling users to go **** themselves!

Which is why telling people NOT to use bootstrap, NOT to use jQuery, NOT to use blueprint, NOT to use YUI, NOT to use Angular -- IS my trying to help as most if not everything done with those could be done simpler, faster, and cleaner without them.

If you're not seeing that -- you don't know enough about the underlying systems or are just willfully ignoring usability and accessibility.

THOUGH I think another place we differ is you're playing around with web applications -- where I'm talking about WEBSITES.

I'll freely admit, web apps are an entirely different ball of wax operating under different rules than websites. You generally KNOW the capabilities of the device your going to run on - a website the only thing you know for certain is you have no IDEA the capabilities of what a user might visit the site on. On a web application you are operating in a narrow environment where accessibility in terms of non-visual non-screen is effectively an impossibility or defeats the entire purpose of building an application. With a website there are dozens if not hundreds of UA's you have to take into account that are non-visual and/or non-screen media -- much less the plethora of device sizes, scaling, and capabilities that are why you NEED to follow things like the WCAG.

I mean, you make a mobile crapplet you can pretty much assume small screen, modern browser engine under the hood, zero concerns for accessibility since as a rule smartphones tell users with accessibility needs to kiss off, a touch interface, possibly the presence of inertial sensing... It's a pretty small range of device capabilities and a narrow target audience. I hate using that phrase... target audience, sets off my marketspeak bull**** detector.

With a website, you don't know what browser past, present, or even future it will be deployed on. Hell that's why HTML was even created in the first place. You don't know if they're blocking scripting or if scripting even applies to their user-agent. You don't know if they are on screen media or some other method of web access. You don't even know if your'e trying to feed content to an actual user or a search engine. (though again Matt Cutts has it right, write for the user, not the search engine!). It's the old joke, the only thing you know for certain about who will visit a website is you cannot know who will visit a website. You then HAVE to pay attention to accessibility norms if it's for a business with more and more places around the globe passing laws fining sites who fail to pass muster. There's a bandwidth crunch where the overhead of pageloads (particularly the number of separate files) MUST be accounted for, more so with search engines now penalizing sites for size, file counts and even hosting speeeds. Search engines are even starting to look at the number of DOM elements and going after people for using more than they need as it slows rendering -- a laugh then that HTML 5 encourages the use of so many extra elements that serve zero legitimate use to any legitimate user.

Which is why it's a web designer's JOB to make anything they build as accessible, useful and usable to as many people as possible. Hence why art is a small part of design that should be applied after, since design should be engineering FIRST. Specifications and guidelines. Accessibilities and limitations of the medium.

Again, something every framework I've ever dealt with gets in the way of or pisses all over; on websites.

So, I'll give you that point -- I've actually agreed with this in the past -- SOME frameworks can make SOME sense on web applications as a LOT of the concerns and worries simply don't apply there. That's a different game entirely, unfortunately in a LOT of cases they still (yes react.js, I'm looking at you) result in more work and not even coming close to helping. Again so many of these systems leave me wondering how anyone could see a benefit from their use. MORE so they remind me way too much of mistakes that I've seen repeated time and time again "once a decade on the decade" in the industry. MORE annoying when the past five or six years all the progress of the prior decade seems to be ending up in the trash as the WORST of late 1990's development practices seem to have come home to roost!

Again, see HTML 5 with the loosening of structural rules, and pointless new tags that are nothing more than pointless redundancies for anyone who took the time to actually understand the Vinnie Babarino of HTML 4 Strict. Hence why frameworks like blueprint, boilerplate and bootstrap which are built on the same outdated mode of thought and pointless redundancies end up using two or three times the markup needed, then delude people into thinking that it was somehow "easier".

In a proper website client side environment where you have all those endless concerns and worries that applications don't have? Well... there's no faster way to make things harder to maintain, harder to develop, slower loading, trash your chances of showing up on search, and all around just tell visitors to your website to sod off, plow themselves, or perform other unnatural acts upon oneself than using a front-end framework!

Yet for some reason people are yumming it up like they were following Pam Anderson around with a waffle cone... In the blind hope she really does **** strawberry ice cream. I've spent FAR too much time this past decade cleaning up after these messes or watching people fail miserably because of them -- and you hear the same lame excuses to justify these sleazy inept practices time and time again that are completely and utterly unfounded bordering on delusional!

On websites.

Though it STILL, even on web applications, seems like a crutch for the inept or a sleazy shortcut -- and after over three decades such things set off EVERY warning bell in my head based on EVERY disaster I've had to clean up based on the same flawed thinking and methodologies. You even actually said it:

Originally Posted by Lesshardtofind

that were written by a bunch of people who weren't even familiar with the technology or frameworks

That unfamiliarity -- aka ignorance (mind you, ignorant is NOT an insult, it means they don't know) -- is why they can be deluded into THINKING it was easier or saved time. It's a trade-off that some people are willing to make. I'm not, and that's mostly because I've seen it bite way too many people in the backside WAY too many times the past decade or so.

Originally Posted by Lesshardtofind

For god sakes you are flaming frameworks on a sub-forum called JavaScript frameworks.

I believe you're the one who started the thread here by quoting me... So apparently you don't want me to respond to your quoting me. GREAT.

Originally Posted by Lesshardtofind

If you aren't here to help

... I am here to help, and in MOST cases if a framework isn't helping, we need to tell them that. EVEN in the framework area!

Joe Forbid! Remember, we worship the sun, but we pray to Joe Pesci!

Originally Posted by Lesshardtofind

please stick to the JavaScript forum

I tend to hit "new posts" and try to help where people need help, and if that means asking someone "why are you using a framework to do CSS' job" I'm going to ask them "why are you using a framework to do CSS' job" and then show them how to do it.

Joe Forbid!

Originally Posted by Lesshardtofind

sorry for being mean

Don't be. It's a disagreement. People are allowed to disagree. If we plastered the fake smiles on our faces always playing "mother may I" and acting like second rate Stepford Wives all the time, nothing would ever get better.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw

No matter how many little old ladies at the afternoon tea party a little harsh language might upset.

Don't EVER worry about what you say to me; I expect the same level of ACTUAL respect from others since ACTUAL RESPECT involves being honest, saying what you mean, and not holding back. Generally speaking platitudes and insincere back-slapping are the exact opposite of respect despite the wild claims to the contrary by uptight metrosexuals and todays "status quo for the win" crowd.

aka the people who blindly claim that everyone is entitled to respect automatically; respect is earned, not given. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

... a stranger will nod, smile, hold their breath and exit quickly. A friend will say "Christmas on a cracker man, take a {expletive omitted} shower!". Which one is more respectful? It's why I'm not a big fan of silver bullet fixes when the entire codebase someone shows is utterly and totally banjaxed.

When someone comes in with a problem, slapping the rose coloured glasses on their head, pouring soothing syrup down their throat and leading them down the garden path to sing kumbaya around the drum circle is NOT the answer -- no matter how good it might feel.