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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

You missed out on the biggest core benefit of frameworks: battle tested code for a very large chunk of your application without having to re-invent it all from scratch. Frameworks give you a stable foundation to build on.

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Are you assuming libraries don't though?

No, with libraries you have to provide the whole structure and this is exactly where plenty of programmers go horribly wrong. Frameworks abstracting out the structure is actually one of their largest benefits.

Except I've never seen a framework help with this at all. I've lost count of the number of code bases I've had to pull a part that used express, symfony, rails, angular, or whatever. Controllers stuffed with business logic, views modifying models... You can't protect coders from themselves.

You can limit the scope of the damage though, and that is an understated benefit of a framework. Architecting solutions for a team is about risk management in many ways.

I'd say most frameworks don't do this very well. One of the reasons I think React is really promising is that it does it better than most, but ironically it isn't a framework.

Personally I think there's no substitute for peer review. Code reviews and pair programming are both far more powerful tools.

Get you, I think that relying on a framework to teach you that is a problem. Once you've used or researched one or more frameworks in an area you learn the successful patterns (right down to file/folder/test/method naming). At that point the whole enforced structure can be a disadvantage.

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