Nicole Sullivan asked. People said:
- 🐦… for the same reason that I buy ingredients rather than growing/raising all of my own food.
- 🐦 I write too many bugs without them.
- 🐦 Avoiding bikeshedding.
- 🐦 … to solve problems that are adjacent to, but distinct from, the problem I’m trying to solve at hand.
- 🐦 Because to create the same functionality would require a much larger team
- 🐦 I want to be able to focus on building the product rather than the tools.
- 🐦 it’s easier to pick a framework and point to docs than teach and document your own solution.
- 🐦 faster development
- 🐦 They have typically solved the problems and in a better way than my first version or even fifth version will be.
There are tons more replies. Jeremy notes “exactly zero mention end users.” I said: Sometimes I just wanna be told what to do.
Nicole stubbed out the responses:
Why do you use frameworks? Almost 100 of you answered. Here are the results. pic.twitter.com/jdcTpA0kf5
— Nicole Sullivan 💎 (@stubbornella) October 16, 2018
If you can’t get enough of the answers here, Rachel asked the same thing a few days later, this time scoped to CSS frameworks.
We are pretty good at capturing (and addressing) use cases for frameworks, but have a pretty big blind spot when it comes to the long-term effects and costs of them.
I’ve at one point sketched one scenario at https://meiert.com/en/blog/the-cost-of-frameworks/ but that’s more to say that I believe we need to gather more—and different data.
I think we often underestimate the payload that web apps create, particularly in simpler applications that don’t particularly need the capabilities of a framework. It seems a lot like we’ve brought back the loading screen from the flash era, for little end user benefit.
As an example, browsing a (very famous) fast food restaurant menu on my mobile, I got to see {{title}} instead of actual menu item names for about ten seconds while the page loaded all the necessary dependencies.
What Jens and Aylwyn say. Frameworks are expensive and longterm it helps to come up with a solution on our own. I’m not sure I’d draw it like Jens but the upward slope with outside frameworks is something I’ve seen as well. (Perhaps a great article for CSS tricks to look at longterm framework issues!)
Why do I use frameworks: because my team already decided on one before I jumped on the project. :)
So agreed to this point. “…for the same reason that I buy ingredients rather than growing/raising all of my own food.” It is just matched with my preferences.
All other comments were equally good. Thanks for sharing such a diverse discussion.