Old developers are wary of frameworks and assume something about them will end up biting them in the end; they are wary of using features they haven’t created. Young developers assume that frameworks and tools work, use them without hesitation, and are surprised when things go wrong.
The truth, as usual, rests somewhere in between.
Thats the entire blog post? It reads like the lead in to a longer post… you lose interest in finishing the post?
How about explaining that somewhere in between…
Amen to that. It took me a long time to finally pick up a framework and a lot of the time it was because I was afraid it would do something I hadn’t accounted for and would leave me code diving constantly to track down unintended behavior. I hate code diving through other folks code.
I’ve recently been working on my first big project with Code Igniter. Before I chose it I built my own lightweight MVC framework to have a better understanding of some design decisions that I hadn’t been able to process on my own without going through it myself. I think this process really helped me grok MVC in the first place and let’s me more clearly see why an MVC might do some things in certain ways.
I’m actually really enjoying CI now but I am approaching it from the mindset that it’s ok if I decide it would be better for me to tear off a little piece and handle it “my” way. So far I’ve only had one instance of this and I just developed a library for CI to handle it how I wanted it done.
@George: My guess is the “somewhere in between” is referring to using a framework but having the knowledge/wisdom to understand that it’s not a silver bullet. That knowledge/wisdom/experience can also be used to know how to deal with problems when they arise (or avoid them altogether) in a way that doesn’t break all the rules of the framework, but also doesn’t leave you building every line of code from scratch either.
PS — I need to stop using your comment section to write blog posts.
Ditch CodeIgniter, use Kohana instead. 🙂
I did look at Kohana briefly and might move to it eventually. I chose to go with CI initially since the documentation was pretty good on it and it was my first MVC project.
[…] Developer Expectations. Old developers are wary of frameworks and assume something about them will end up biting them in the end; they are wary of using features they haven’t created. Young developers assume that frameworks and tools work, use them without hesitation, and are surprised when things go wrong. […]