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Comment by eggsby | Hacker News Reader

I'd argue that the problems in large projects are primarily architecture problems, that backbone's philosophy of 'bring your own architecture' means how well an app is structured is entirely up to its authors rather than defined by library choice. Something like your plastronjs or emberjs are saying 'Here, do it like this'. Which is good. Sometimes.

I've certainly run into many issues using backbone for moderately sized applications (form workflows, several different types of records, etc) but every time I get myself out of them I gain general javascript knowledge rather than domain specific knowledge about framework xyz. I'd much rather know how to effectively manage memory in javascript than how to use a particular framework.

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Following the same argument, you should probably have started with assembler - because, then you would have gained a significant amount of knowledge about the system ( at such a deep level ).

The point of programming is about creating abstractions, so that you dont have to think in terms of the underlying infrastructure. The higher the level of abstraction, the faster you can code, the faster your output will be and faster the business can progress towards a product.

The question is : Is the end goal of your project a product for a business or a means for you to learn the nitty-gritties of javascript?

That's great, if you frameworks abstractions aren't leaky. Which they almost certainly are.

At that point the question is whether the troubleshooting, as stated, will teach you about how to solve the problem with javascript in general or framework specific contortions to work around it.

Assuming that all frameworks are leaky and writing from scratch is almost always a waste of time. Even if something is leaky and you spend a week trying to fix it, it will probably still be faster to build using those abstractions than to build something from scratch.

In my current company, we were building a multi page form for registration. It took us ( 2 guys ) a whole of 3 weeks ( with html and css pre built! ) to bring it to a level that is acceptable. I had built the same with angular earlier because I was trying to show that it could be done faster and with lesser code. The guys in management did not accept it because it is still "new". So we spent 3 weeks building this which would have taken around 3-5 days in angular.

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