4 Comments

  1. Derik

    Very well said!

    I think the increasing demand for framework proficient developers have changed the general mindset of what to know when and where. It’s like expecting a driver to know how an engine of a vehicle works before he can efficiently drive the vehicle instead of being able to drive the vehicle correctly.

  2. Grant Walker

    I think you’ve really started to uncover a very deep issue in the development community (at large and not just in PHP specifically).

    A lot of frameworks (Symfony and ZF included) are built on sound architectural principles which are implemented on top of a language. It’s my assertion that many (if not all) developers can really benefit from delving into these principles. This will assist them in structuring their own applications in a more robust manner; as well as understanding what is going on when a problem occurs.

    Also, frameworks should be used primarily when they abstract a particularly difficult/tricky concept/pattern. A question that you should ask yourself is: “Given all the functionality that this piece of the framework is providing, will I be using it, and if not, is there a simpler way of implementing/achieving the outcome?”

    I think that this problem is definitely one of “when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail”.

    • I totally agree.

      The issue I’m seeing most often is that developers don’t understand that the principles that frameworks are using is most of the time standard design patterns, but rather think it is something unique to the framework.
      Concepts like Dependency Injection isn’t unique to Symfony or Zend. The implementation is different, but the concept stays the same.

      And if every developer can start to understand these concepts better, then they can evolve their skills outside of the framework, and get out of the mindset that a framework determines a skill set.

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