Why frameworks have never been good

My experience in using frameworks have sucked. When I coded UI using Angular, the early one, guess it was 1 or 2, it was terrible. I felt the google engineers who coded it up felt that they have discovered something out of the world, that can be consumed by the user just by being in awe of their cleverness. It was completely wacky, with crazy syntax making your code unreadable. I will quote one example from the past to give you a flavor of what I am alluding to. I guess it is to paint the HTML list items using a for loop.

<ul>
   <li *ngFor="let item of createRange(5); let currentElementIndex=index+1">
      {{currentElementIndex}} Something
   </li>
</ul>

The Angular authors just expect you to be crafty and rest everything they assure of taking care. You can read here to see how things go from here into more finer artsy software design.

Only those with no idea of the end user can design something like this. Those who are steeped in self-pride as a greatest piano player can never produce a soulful music. Programming is just a means to an end.

Languages are just an elegant way of expressing your thoughts to a machine. They are not there to be meddled and jumbled to produce something that appear out of synch. To me this whole Angular thing appeared discordant as they say in Music.

I feel the same thing with Spring now. All these Inversion of Container business is just a way of making more google programmers. The focus is more on marketing the concept as something heavenly than to truly solve a problem for a user. In fact they just shift the problem from programming to searching.

The company that makes the framework codes up everything and as a programmer you are supposed to focus on business logic. But can you in reality ?

You will find yourself searching for every letter you type from annotations to the syntax in an YML file. You will be trying endlessly some Stack Overflow examples until one succeeds.

You lose a lot of time doing this and will get frustrated if you are not one of those google programmers.

Another issue with frameworks that take control of things from the programmer is they have to provide you everything on the planet. All sorts of functions to support all sorts of behavior. Modifying them to suit your needs is way too hard. You will still find in one corner of the Web, some brave heart who would’ve attempted it.

Because they end up supporting all sorts of functions, the documentation is always way behind making things hard to go and lookup the original source. You may have to wait for a O’Reilly lizard book that is written for 500 pages to look up something that matters to you.

Frameworks kill creativity in the name of making things easy. They add their own layer of syntax and semantics on top a language sucking the time of real programmers.

Overall, I feel, just allow people to write code, with some easy to use, well documented libraries. Python seem to come to my mind with the most simple to use syntax, yet that allows powerful things to be accomplished.