#leaverou

Today, I was reading an interview to Lea Verou at Appliness. And, I asked to myself: Why is Lea Verou awesome?

I thought about it for a few minutes and then I kept reading. I finally found the answer, when I read the following paragraphs:

- Do you use any frameworks when you develop? If so, do you have any favorites?

Not really. I might occasionally use jQuery or LESS or some other framework or library, but I generally try to develop at the lowest level of abstraction I can comfortably work with. I like being able to fix issues that arise on my own, I like to know what code I’m running and I don’t like making the browser download and parse stuff it’s not going to use.

I’m also paranoid about growing dependent on a framework that might become abandoned at some point. Being open source is no guarantee. Frameworks go in and out of fashion and any open source project’s community might shrink and eventually die, in the long term.

It has happened many times in projects that were once popular. I also find that often, learning to use big, complex frameworks takes the same — if not more — time than writing the subset of functionality you need yourself (and learning from that!). I’ve learned most of the JS I know by writing a 5000-line JavaScript framework of my own (with a UI addon, akin to jQuery UI!) in 2009, that I never released. I know my view is not very popular.

The dev community is often more eager to learn about frameworks and libraries than the core technologies they are built with, but it works for me. If nobody ever tried to reinvent the wheel, our cars would still roll on wood. However, don’t get me wrong: I don’t think that using frameworks and libraries is bad.

If it makes you more productive and you’re able to craft better web apps with them, go for it! However, I think a solid understanding of the underlying technology always helps to use them more efficiently. In other words, use frameworks because you don’t have the time, not because you lack the knowledge.

I recommend that you read the full interview.