The first question you always ask now when writing a new webapp is hey, what front-end framework will we use — Ember, Angular, or React?
But having to choose which framework to use is like deciding between being shot and poisoned. Instead of frameworks, we should call them “scaffolds” — because they’re where we hang ourselves.
Almost every webapp these days is built using one of these three frameworks or a similar one. And they use frameworks for CSS, frameworks for building, frameworks for testing, and frameworks for other things. We no longer write code in JavaScript or CSS or HTML; we write code in pseudo-languages designed by framework developers.
When did we go framework-crazy? When did we decide that the answer to all our problems was a framework? This insane fixation on frameworks appears to be a millenial phenomenon — brought to you by the generation who never really learned software architecture. Their solution to any problem is a framework which dictates not just what you do, but also what you think. In their view, the developer’s role is merely to hang things like Christmas ornaments on the Christmas tree of their framework.
What we need is not frameworks, but un-frameworks, or anti-frameworks, or no frameworks at all. I make a proposal at the end of this essay; read on.
