(Frame)Work Hard, Play Hard
10 Oct 2019
If only all work was as efficient as Framework
Although I’ve dabbled in using writing HTML over the years, I’ve tended to avoid it and never really learned too much. To me, it seemed like a lot of effort just to create a page looking like it belongs in an AOL browser. (For those who don’t even know what AOL is, that just goes to show how out of touch my webpages felt.) Overall, the product looked primitive, sloppy, and unprofessional–not something I would consider a valuable use of my time. After trying out a framework to assist in webpage production, suddenly a new world was revealed where the tedious portion of work could be done for me. Instead of painstakingly using guess and check to find aesthetically pleasing margins, it was done for me with a single simple line of code. No longer did I need to fret over every detail, as a framework would take care of the bulk of the work for me. New possibilities emerged, both in quality of work and efficiency of time. The idea of better code in less time is an incredible relief to me, and I’m sure all other programmers would agree. The webpages below are similar, but one is coded with html and the other using a framework. The aesthetic differences may be subtle, but the top one was using a framework that made it much easier to arrange the page, and further adjustments would be much simpler as well.
Letting the code do the work for you
When programming in languages such as C++ and Java, the idea is to use code to make even monumental tasks incredibly simple. Just as a calculator can find the square root of a huge number over a thousand times quicker than the average human, programs can nearly instantaneously find answers to problems which could take a human months or even years. The next level to this concept relates to how two programs can accomplish the same thing despite having vastly different code. For example, a recursive or looped function can accomplish the same as copy/pasting the same code hundreds of times. Taking this concept further, simply writing a function and repeatedly calling it with relevant parameters is much more efficient than reusing the code over and over. Routines and subroutines pave a path for a much easier programming and prettier code.
Moving beyond micromanagement
Once the functions are correctly written, all the coder needs to do is examine the overall strategy. Much like an admiral doesn’t want to give orders for each ship’s direction change in a fleet, a coder does not want to have to micromanage each individual detail of a program or webpage. By using frameworks, we can essentially give orders that will take care of the details. This leaves us with the ability to worry about the big picture instead. Think about it: how hard would it be to walk if you consciously command each muscle in your feet, legs, and arms? We depend on muscle memory so we can pay attention to our surroundings. Otherwise, the attention demanded by each of our toes, feet, knees, legs, and arms would overwhelm our ability to simply avoid an approaching car. Although using frameworks may not literally save your life, it can certainly improve the quality of life for website developers everywhere. In this humble programming student’s opinion, life is too short not to use frameworks.