Do you really need to create your own framework ?

I don’t know if it’s just me, but every time a new framework hype arrives you get all this discussions between people who say wonderful things about it, and people who just hate them, or simply don’t care.

As a professional web developer for almost 9 years and a web/internet enthusiast for, well…almost my entire life, I’ve came across with a lot of different ways of doing things.
I remember when some people said “man, you gotta learn Flash/JAVA, it will be the end of HTML for good”, I think Apple is laughing at them right now. Oh, and I never really learned flash, except for some little AS script skills. Point being is, technologies come and go and you either learn them or reject them. At the end of the day it’s really up to you. Do you really want to kill a bird with a bazooka , or an elephant with a mouse trap ?

Today however, language frameworks are the ones in the spot light, you have, Ruby on Rails; Django; Kohana, etc.. and some people just simply refuse to use it.
Why ? Well, some of them argue that in order to become a really programmer you need to know how to create a framework, you have to know how things are done.
You can agree with them, in fact, if you are learning a new language, doing things from scratch can really help you. Or can’t ?

It depends, are you a very good programmer ? Or a lousy one ? If you are a lousy one, chances are you will not learn anything by creating a framework, in fact it will even make you a worse one. Why ? Well, a framework is a very overwhelming piece of software, it’s like building a factory for creating not just one type of product but a lot of different ones. And if the factory is not correctly build, your products will not be good, or worst case scenario, your factory won’t fit your needs in a long run.
Besides, most of this custom frameworks are created by one person, which leaves them with a lot of stuff to think of, while open source can be contributed by many, and so it can get more stable much faster. And don’t get me started on bugs and security. Also, the fact is, if you don’t comment or document your code in a year or two you will not know what your code is actually doing, and then you start to think of creating a new one from scratch.

I’m against creating a custom framework without being OS. Not against custom code of course. But call it whatever you want, but building custom code should meet a very specific purpose. Look at Facebook for instance, they’ve created their own app, hell, they even created their own PHP compiler, but because they really need it. On the other hand you have Twitter with almost 7TB of tweets per day, and they are running RoR (Or were, according to Techcrunch). So what’s your purpose for creating your framework ?

In fact, I believe most of people who create custom frameworks for their own are unexperienced programmers. Why ? Most of the professionals programmers I know use or learn a framework, not because they don’t know how to code, but because they’ve all done what the framework does, and we are sick reinventing the wheel every time. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. So why waste more time creating it ? Why not just use that time to create something meaningful, instead of worrying about ORM, Cache, template, form validations, etc. It’s old and it’s boring. I could that if I wanted, but I don’t have to, it won’t add any more value to me as a programmer.

If you need something more specific that a framework can’t do, do it yourself, nothing wrong about that, this is where you will learn something, because you never done it.

At the end, I believe that the good programmers who create their own framework are afraid of just letting go. Are afraid of stopping to worry about specific issues that their users won’t even know it’s there, like core code. It’s like they need to do that from bottom up, in order to believe that they are the hardcore-kick-ass-coders.

So, do you really need to create your own framework ?