The advantage of frameworks is to have a "common language" to achieve some goals together with a team. A good framework hides some of the stupid mistakes you would do when you would try to develop that "language" from scratch.
When you do a project from scratch, if you work enough on it, you end up wishing you would have started differently and you refactor pieces of it. While using a framework I sometimes have moments where I suddenly get the underlying reasons and advantages of doing things in a certain way, but that comes once you become more of a power user, than at start, and only if you put the effort to question. And other times the framework is just bad and you have to switch...
The AI pilled view is coding is knitting and AI is an automated loom.
But it is not quite the case. The hand coded solution may be quicker than AI at reaching the business goal.
If there is an elegant crafted solution that stays in prod 10 years and just works it is better than an initially quicker AI coded solution that needs more maintenance and demands a team to maintain it.
If AI (and especially bad operators of AI) codes you a city tower when you need a shed, the tower works and looks great but now you have 500k/y in maintaining it.
I've used React on projects and understand its usefulness, but also React has killed my love of frontend development. And now that everyone is using it to build huge, clunky SPAs instead of normal websites that just work, React has all but killed my love of using the web, too.
Predicated upon the definition of "magic" provided in the article: What is it, if anything, about magic that draws people to it? Is there a process wherein people build tolerance and acceptance to opaque abstractions through learning? Or, is it acceptance that "this is the way things are done", upheld by cargo cult development, tutorials, examples, and the like, for the sake of commercial expediency? I can certainly understand that seldom is time afforded to building a deep understanding of the intent, purpose, and effect of magic abstractions under such conditions.
Granted, there are limits to how deep one should need to go in understanding their ecosystem of abstractions to produce meaningful work on a viable timescale. What effect does it have on the trade to, on the other hand, have no limit to the upward growth of the stack of tomes of magical frameworks and abstractions?
> What is it, if anything, about magic that draws people to it?
Simple: if it's magic, you don't have to do the hard work of understanding how it works in order to use it. Just use the right incantation and you're done. Sounds great as long as you don't think about the fact that not understanding how it works is actually a bug, not a feature.
Or is just a specialization choice. Taxi drivers don't care how a car works, they hire a mechanic for that. Doctors don't care how a catscan works they just care that it provides the data they need in a useful format.
I think it's "this is the way things are done in order to achieve X". Where people don't question neither whether this is the only way to achieve X, nor whether they do really care about X in the first place.
It seems common with regard to dependency injection frameworks. Do you need them for your code to be testable? No, even if it helps. Do you need them for your code to be modular? You don't, and do you really need modularity in your project? Reusability? Loose coupling?
If you are the only person who ever touches your code, fine, otherwise I despise this attitude and would insta-reject any candidate who said this. In a team setting, "I don't like magic" and "I don't want to learn a framework" means: "I want you to learn my bespoke framework I'm inevitably going to write."
I also don't like magic, but React is the wrong definition of magic in this case. It's an abstraction layer for UI and one that is pretty simple when you think about it conceptually. The complexity is by third party library that are building on top of it, but proposing complex machineries instead of simple ones. Then you have a culture of complexity around simple technology.
But it does seems that culture of complexity is more pervasive lately. Things that could have been a simple gist or a config change is a whole program that pulls tens of dependencies from who knows who.
If you have this attitude I hope you write everything in assembly. Except assembly is compiled into micro-ops, so hopefully you avoid that by using an 8080 (according to a quick search, the last Intel CPU to not have micro-ops.)
In other words, why is one particular abstraction (e.g. Javscript, or the web browser) ok, but another abstraction (e.g. React) not? This attitude doesn't make sense to me.
Are you seriously saying that you can't understand the concept of different abstractions having different levels of usefulness? That's the law of averages taken to cosmic proportions.
If this is true, why have more than one abstraction?
The advantage of frameworks is to have a "common language" to achieve some goals together with a team. A good framework hides some of the stupid mistakes you would do when you would try to develop that "language" from scratch.
When you do a project from scratch, if you work enough on it, you end up wishing you would have started differently and you refactor pieces of it. While using a framework I sometimes have moments where I suddenly get the underlying reasons and advantages of doing things in a certain way, but that comes once you become more of a power user, than at start, and only if you put the effort to question. And other times the framework is just bad and you have to switch...
The problem with this is that it means you have to read guides which it seems no one wants to do. It drives me nuts.
But ya, I hate when people say they don't like "magic." It's not magic, it's programming.
The AI pilled view is coding is knitting and AI is an automated loom.
But it is not quite the case. The hand coded solution may be quicker than AI at reaching the business goal.
If there is an elegant crafted solution that stays in prod 10 years and just works it is better than an initially quicker AI coded solution that needs more maintenance and demands a team to maintain it.
If AI (and especially bad operators of AI) codes you a city tower when you need a shed, the tower works and looks great but now you have 500k/y in maintaining it.
You could walk through the framework so you then understand it. There are several "let's create react from scratch" articles
https://pomb.us/build-your-own-react/
Certain frameworks were so useful they arguably caused an explosion the productivity. Rails seems like one. React might be too.
I've used React on projects and understand its usefulness, but also React has killed my love of frontend development. And now that everyone is using it to build huge, clunky SPAs instead of normal websites that just work, React has all but killed my love of using the web, too.
What I cannot build. I do not understand
Predicated upon the definition of "magic" provided in the article: What is it, if anything, about magic that draws people to it? Is there a process wherein people build tolerance and acceptance to opaque abstractions through learning? Or, is it acceptance that "this is the way things are done", upheld by cargo cult development, tutorials, examples, and the like, for the sake of commercial expediency? I can certainly understand that seldom is time afforded to building a deep understanding of the intent, purpose, and effect of magic abstractions under such conditions.
Granted, there are limits to how deep one should need to go in understanding their ecosystem of abstractions to produce meaningful work on a viable timescale. What effect does it have on the trade to, on the other hand, have no limit to the upward growth of the stack of tomes of magical frameworks and abstractions?
> What is it, if anything, about magic that draws people to it?
Simple: if it's magic, you don't have to do the hard work of understanding how it works in order to use it. Just use the right incantation and you're done. Sounds great as long as you don't think about the fact that not understanding how it works is actually a bug, not a feature.
Or is just a specialization choice. Taxi drivers don't care how a car works, they hire a mechanic for that. Doctors don't care how a catscan works they just care that it provides the data they need in a useful format.
I think it's "this is the way things are done in order to achieve X". Where people don't question neither whether this is the only way to achieve X, nor whether they do really care about X in the first place.
It seems common with regard to dependency injection frameworks. Do you need them for your code to be testable? No, even if it helps. Do you need them for your code to be modular? You don't, and do you really need modularity in your project? Reusability? Loose coupling?
If you are the only person who ever touches your code, fine, otherwise I despise this attitude and would insta-reject any candidate who said this. In a team setting, "I don't like magic" and "I don't want to learn a framework" means: "I want you to learn my bespoke framework I'm inevitably going to write."
I also don't like magic, but React is the wrong definition of magic in this case. It's an abstraction layer for UI and one that is pretty simple when you think about it conceptually. The complexity is by third party library that are building on top of it, but proposing complex machineries instead of simple ones. Then you have a culture of complexity around simple technology.
But it does seems that culture of complexity is more pervasive lately. Things that could have been a simple gist or a config change is a whole program that pulls tens of dependencies from who knows who.
If you have this attitude I hope you write everything in assembly. Except assembly is compiled into micro-ops, so hopefully you avoid that by using an 8080 (according to a quick search, the last Intel CPU to not have micro-ops.)
In other words, why is one particular abstraction (e.g. Javscript, or the web browser) ok, but another abstraction (e.g. React) not? This attitude doesn't make sense to me.
You can learn JavaScript and code for life. You can’t learn React and code for life.
Yeah, JavaScript is an illusion (to be exact, a concept). But it’s the one that we accept as fundamental. People need fundamentals to rely upon.
Are you seriously saying that you can't understand the concept of different abstractions having different levels of usefulness? That's the law of averages taken to cosmic proportions.
If this is true, why have more than one abstraction?
I just think everyone who says they don't like magic should be forced to give an extemporaneous explanation of paging.