Are Frameworks Making Developers Dumb?

Hi,

My point is not that we are all have to go back and start from zero.

If I take my girl friend for a long drive in a car and If the car engine's fan belt is displaced I would feel like If i have a basic idea on how to open the banet and put the fan belt in proper position that will be safe and good :-)

Thanks,

Siva

It seems my point conveyed in different way as if i said we shouldn't use any framework and we have to use core platform only. But thats not my point.

The problem here is the education of this interviewed people

This is what I am trying to say. The interviewed candidates claims that they are very good at core java and saying that we can't add/remove elements to an ArrayList which is declared as final.

No matter whether you use frameworks or not you should know the basics of collections to say you can add/remove elements toan ArrayList declared as final.

I completely agree with Sivaprasadreddy.  Frameworks are starting are a nightmare! And I have run into the same problem when interviewing people.  They have no idea what technology they are using and even why it is important.  An interview question I typically ask is if a Struts Action or Spring Controller are thread safe?  Most don't know the answer and worse yet most don't even know why it is important!  If you want an even better laugh, ask an interviewee about custom JSP tags!  Spring exists for only 1 reason - to turn Tomcat into a hacked up Java EE server without using an EE server.  Now backi in the day when all you had was Tomcat and no really viable EE servers, this might be justifiable.  Nowadays, EE servers are mature and Spring needs to go away, quickly!

Personally I do not think frameworks, specifically Spring and Hibernate, make for any better or faster code.  Let's explore the words "better" and "faster".  Ok, so "better".  Well, to get Spring or hibernate to do anything I desprately try to google and find an example (2 or 3 are better because the first ones are always for older versions of the framework which don't work anymore), I then cut and paste the example into my code, reconfigure it, and cross my fingers and hope it works.  If by some miracle it does work, leave it alone! Don't want to risk breaking it.  With this cut-and-paste-and-hope-for-the-best method, I really have no idea what the code is doing, but somehow this is "better"?  I think not!  How about "faster"?  Well, let's see.  Well for our project we want needed to do X and some developer gets all excited...Spring can do X!  Well, ok. so we go with Spring.  2 weeks later we've got over a dozen spring configuration files (doing who knows what!) with Spring specific classes (I though Spring was suppose to be non-invasive, that's a laugh!) to cludge it all together.  As an exercise after this 2 week fiasco I decided just to code it...done in 2 days.  

If you like to develop code, stick with the EE API, the tools/services it gives you, and go code!  

If you like to configure tools and look at xml all day, go the framework route.

This thread points to one of the biggest problems in our industry.  The fact that your interviewees were unable to answer specific questions about frameworks they claimed to have worked with for years was not an indication that they were dumb.  They were probably very intelligent and if you would have asked them any question about the way that they utilized the framework for those years, they would have answered easily.  The problem is they only learned what they needed to know to get the job done.  I have seen this in every place I've worked since I started programming professionally.  We are all on very tight deadlines.  The orders from above are typically "Just make it work, I need it now" and that is what we do.  There is very little time for designing, documenting, or testing and absolutly no time for learning.  On one hand we have a new frameworking appearing, it seems, every other month.  This is good.  The frameworks are supposed to help us develop faster and more efficient.  On the other hand we have to try and fit learning the famework in between getting the job done.  The end result?  We learn just enough to get the job done and try to learn more as our spare time permits.  Does this make us dumb?  Not by a long shot. 

On the other, other hand the interviewees who have memorized every bit of the framework and can define every term you throw at them typically can not craft their way out of a paper bag.  I wrote my first program in 1983.  After all these years and all the different places I've worked, I still believe programming is a craft not a science.  I have only ever had one interview, in all that time, that treated it way and it was the best job I ever had.

The car analogy is incomplete. We're not regular drivers, we are professionals - akin to race car or truck driver. While both can't build a transmission engine, they know how they work and why it's there.

The thing is that even in mature industries, abstractions leak when pushed to the limit. If you don't know the concepts, you'll not know what to do when the leak happens. Or worse, you'll simply use the wrong tool for the job.

Bottom line, if you're using a framework, at least know why you're using it - and specially when not to use it.

Hi Sandeep,
I think you haven't read all the comments. I am not saying everyone should know the internal working mechanisms of their frameworks.

I don't know what happens to the system bus when i used 'synchronized' but i know how the application behaves when I used 'synchronized' and when to use 'synchronized'.

If you say we can hire the people who don't know basics of core java like collections but know how to google for dispatcher servlet configuration and be able copy paste the code snippets and say i am done..plz go ahead and hire them. But my company/projects want people who are aware of what they are doing and why they are doing.

Dear Readers,
Lot of thanks for reading this post and providing your comments.

Today I googled with the title of this post and after seeing the comments in various sites i am surprised and at the sametime I am shocked.

In this post I tried to say if we have good knowledge on core concepts it would help us to write better software either using frameworks or without using frameworks.

I think the title of the post is misleading what I tried to convey.

But I don't undestand why people ignore the main point and concentrating on other aspects like which country I am belongs to, how bad my english written skills are, earlier I posted articles on Spring, Hibernate etc and now saying using framewroks makes developers dumb and the list going on..
And some other people starting turning this topic to a debate on XML versus Annotations.

Did anywhere in the post i mentioned like "STOP USING FRAMEWORKS. AND WRITE YOUR SOFTWARE IN ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE"?

I only said lean the basics like core java, servlets, jsp which would help you to better understand the frameworks.

Let me tell you why I feel like being strong in basics will help to understand and use frameworks in a better way.
At the very beginning of my career I got to work on a struts based project and I know a little bit about Struts.
I got some issue and I tried to resolve it for 2 days but I am not able to.
Finally I went to my team lead and explained about the problem.

My team lead was 9 years experienced developer who never worked on Struts earlier.
He think about the issue for a minute and gave a solution without even looking at the code.
Then I asked him how you are able to give solution without having Struts knowledge?

Then he smiled and said
"If you are good at Core Java, Servlets, JSP and have strong understand on Design Patterns you don't need to learn each n every frameworks. You can just start using them rightaway".

So I personally feel that being strong in core concepts is always good.

If you feel like one can write poems without knowing how to write words its your wish.

Thanks all for your comments.
-Siva

Also, please stop amazing people with your deductive abilities - Did I say we can hire people who don't know basics and write code by googling? How in heavens did you conclude that? Your comprehension skills seems as sharp as your deductive abilities!

btw, do you know a company which doesn't want people who are aware of what they are doing? Did you land yesterday, from Mars!!

The problem is not high level abstraction vs low level abstraction.

The problem is to understand what the frameworks are for, what problem they really solve in an efficient way. Spring/JEE? Use them too much and you code is unecessary complex, more difficult to understand and maintain. Really usefull for the most complex cases, increase complexity in simple cases.

Hibernate and ORMs? Work well for CRUD but tend to introduce new problems with their caching strategy and have performance problem with advanced queries. It is not uncommon to have ORM code requiring one minute of processing while the simpler equivalent 3 liners SQL perform in 100ms.

Add to this that theses technologies and frameworks are promoted by vendors that make a living on them and that many architects just blindy follow the 'standard' and apply always the same stack and you better understand why we are in such situation!

Why do we use hibernate/spring (or JEE) ? Well it's the standard, everybody does it and it look well on the CV. Nobody can't blame you for using the standard. Does it help to solve your problem? They don't have a clue. But the vendor provide lot of good powerpoint presentation that say so you can show to your boss in case of.

In short, there are a lot of code monkeys*. People that work in IT without personal involvement with technology.

A developer, as opposed to a code monkey, is expected not only to code against an API but when issues arise to identify the problems. For example, Hibernate and lazy relations is a classic problem of an excepton with "Session closed". A person that does not understand what Hibernate does and how it works will stare blankly at that issue...

 * - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_monkey

If you agree to this, we'll surely disagree about what "important" means. People don't understand cars because cars work. People know a whole lot about cars that break down five times a day.

How am I supposed to know why I should use Spring if I never ran into any of the problems which Spring solves? Why do I have to understand the intricate details of DI when Spring "just works" for me? Why do I have to be able to keep all this useless knowledge in my brain when I never need it? Or when I can ask the Spring Guru in my team?

Nobody expects the web designers to know the JEE spec. We all agree that each member of the team knows the spec to a different degree. Is that bad? No! We use frameworks to free our brain power from mundane, stupid tasks and knowledge so we can concentrate on the few important aspects of our work.

As for final mutables: This is a trick question. It's a nice way to have some fun with a poor, nervous sod during an interview but it only tells me whether he has memorized the Java spec - which will tell me something about him but not whether he's a good developer. Depending on my programming style, I might never use or need final at all. Does that make me good or bad? The real pain point is that nobody really knows how to create a interview which answers the basic question: Is this a good programmer?

If he's not a good programmer today, maybe he has everything I need to make him great and productive within a couple of weeks or months? Maybe he sucks at coding but he's great at answering the phone. That might do more about my productivity than any line of code he could write because it means that I can finally get some work done.

So my conclusion is that it's funny if someone doesn't know something which we deem crucial but in the end, it says more about how pedantic we are ourselves.

Chinese proverb: He who asks a question is an idiot for five minutes. He who doesn't ask dies an idiot.

Discouraging "stupid" questions makes the world dumber.

I completely agree with wofly & siva, his scenario had Sr. Software engineer. The job description is to supervisor a team of new guys. It is imperative for him to be aware of techy stuff.May be we should be clear of what we are asking. Usage of framework is one thing & knowing how it does is another thing.

I'm a proud java developer, sadly not so proud when someone asks me how JVM works in the desktop.

siva, just for you. If you are looking for a guy of know-how of JEE. Just mention frameworks as nice to have ;).

I use framework to get the work quitely & quickly. Added advantage, the guy maitianing it doesn't need to know how it works. All he needs to know if how to add a fix it.