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Comment by physicsguy | Hacker News Reader

Speed? Familiarity for other developers? I don't think those should be underestimated, particularly for solo devs and small companies just getting started.

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Frameworks do give some early traction, as I mentioned. And lots of PHP devs really only know Laravel, a shame because eventually they will have to debug it or work around limitations.

I meant to make the point that frameworks come with a cost, which may get deferred for a while. Maybe that doesn’t matter. For PHP and Go specifically I don’t see the point since the languages have everything you need out of the box.

Sorry, I'm going to have to disagree. For most projects, you have to draw the line somewhere, so why pick a point of abstraction where you're likely not to change anything the MVC framework provides? It sounds like you've been bitten by some opinionated frameworks and maintenance pita, also wanting to know as much as possible what code is doing? However, for most web projects it's just not realistic to recode routers, middleware, auth? Most good frameworks provide a solution with materials that are ready to use, quality controlled by hundreds of people, and many thousands of hours.

Bootstrap 3 is a perfect example of why you wouldn't pick a UI framework, if you have demands for pixel-perfect design or custom animations you'll be immediately battling the framework in those areas. That doesn't mean all frameworks are bad, like graphic designers rarely use MS Paint and draw each pixel because it would take forever, i.e. you're not being an efficient engineer. If you're building a house, why make bricks yourself, chop trees for wood, or forge custom roof tiles?

To me, PHP / Go are themselves abstractions of an enormous amount of complexity, so why stop there, why not go as high as you can imho, higher = less code?

This is also another winning point of the framework: Frameworks save you time, and allow you to write less code. By writing less code, it is much easier to understand what your program is doing, and change it as requirements change.

When you work without a framework, you invent your own framework. It won't be as well thought through - guaranteed. When changes come in, the sheer amount of code means mistakes will be made and your code will slowly turn into spaghetti. If this is a custom FFMPeg conversion service - totally worth it. If it's CRUD, like how 90% of apps are CRUD, then it's probably a mistake.

As I told another programmer, using a framework doesn't mean you are a "semi-skilled" programmer (what elitism). It means you know you aren't special, you aren't smarter than other programmers, you know your own limitations, and know that using a framework other people understand (and keeping the amount of code to a minimum) is the best for your company and the project.

Try to understand the difference between not using a framework and inventing your own framework. No one in this thread advocated writing their own framework. I originally pointed out that PHP and Go include everything you need to write web applications in the language and standard libraries. They don't need a framework at all.

Yes, frameworks have some advantages as you listed. And they have disadvantages. Before doing the same thing over again with Laravel, or Goravel (the original topic of this thread) think hard about the trade-offs. Frameworks impose limitations, on both the application and the programmer.

Having worked on several projects in the past where the clients had either their own frameworks, and or proprietary languages I think familiarity is highly overrated in most (but not all cases). If you're building something trivial or basically throwaway then familiarity does play a role, but if it's non-trivial all the other costs outweigh any initial learning.

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