I just read this tweet:

Using a framework is rarely the right solution to inexperience. It’s giving a learner driver a faster car. Just learn how to drive a car.

— I Am Devloper (@iamdevloper) February 5, 2015

And I couldn’t disagree more with it.

Giving a newbie a framework to use instead of having to learn from the ground up is more comparable to giving a new driver an automatic car with keyless entry and ignition instead of a manual one with normal key entry and ignition. They both get the job done, but one is easier to use than the other.

Whether or not that ease of use becomes a crutch or liability is another story. But it’s certainly not the same as handing 600 bhp Lamborghini to someone who’s just been behind the wheel once. An automatic car will boost the new driver’s confidence, whereas the Lamborghini will do this:

Coming back to the frameworks, I feel front-end frameworks such as Bootstrap and Foundation are the automatics of web development and as such are extremely useful and necessary. Back-end frameworks are a bit of a mixed bag, like how classic CodeIgniter was an enhanced version of PHP (a decent automatic car), whereas Laravel barely even looks like PHP (a fighter jet, perhaps). But that’s a topic for another story altogether…

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