alt Hacker NewsIt’s a simple math problem. And it is also Conway’s law that says all software design follows the organization that built it—that is all software design is political.
A framework calls you. You call a library.
A framework constrains the program. A library expands the program.
It’s easier to write a library that is future proofed because it just needs to satisfy its contract.
It’s harder to write a framework because it imposes a contract on everything that depends on it.
Just like it is hard to write tort law without a lot of jurisprudence to build out experience and test cases, it is hard to write a framework from only one use case.
No one likes lawyers because they block you from doing what you want. This is the problem with frameworks.
However the government likes laws because they block you from doing what you want. Same with whomever is directing engineering that wants all other programmers to work in a consistent way.
Technically everything you have written is true. But the proliferation of frameworks is almost a self-reinforcing antipattern.
> No one likes lawyers because they block you from doing what you want.
Or even doing what you need to do.
Certainly, to the extent that a mini-framework is composed of more constraints piled on top of an extant bigger framework, mini-frameworks are, like swimming pools, attractive nuisances. "Hey, look, guys! This is so much simpler!"
> It’s harder to write a framework because it imposes a contract on everything that depends on it.
Judging by what people write and use, I'm not sure this is _exactly_ true. Sure, writing a _good_ framework or library is hard, but people accept piss-poor frameworks, and accept libraries that were designed to work in conjunction with a single framework.
> It’s easier to write a library that is future proofed because it just needs to satisfy its contract.
But the thing is that the library itself defines the contract, and it might be a piss-poor one for many applications.
There is some excellent code out there, and there is a lot of shitty code out there. I think the problem is social; too many people want to write code that is in charge. Now, maybe it's somewhat technical, in that they have used things that are in charge, and they were too big (leading to the mini-framework of the article) or they were otherwise not great, so this leads to yet another framework (cue standards xkcd cartoon) because they realize they need something in charge, but aren't happy with their current options.
And, of course, since the frameworks they know take a kitchen sink mentality, their new framework does as well. (Maybe it's a smaller sink, but everything needed is still shoved in there.) So there are yet more libraries that are tied to yet another framework.
Because writing good libraries that are completely framework independent _can_ be as challenging as writing a good framework. And when someone decides they need a new framework, they are focused on that, and making it work well, and since that drives their thought process, everything else the write gets shoved into the framework.