Peter Wayner in an eloquent piece for InfoWorld expresses what has become the reality for programmers today. In the modern era the frameworks have superseded the programming language foundations on which they are built. The language wars have cooled and given way to the flares of the Framework Flame War.
This was inevitable; After all, it saves time and just makes more sense to stand on the shoulders of giants than to constantly reinvent the wheel and repeat countless past mistakes. Today we string routines together using battle tested and well optimized libraries from Integrated Development Environments (IDE)s and intelligent text editors like Subime, Emacs and Textmate. Few ever need to rewrite an insertion sort or develop their own B-Tree implementation outside of college and the world of embedded systems programming. Frankly, it is rarely a necessity to implement these algorithms from scratch.
Now, more than ever, you will get further faster by understanding the intricacies of the API and the methodologies guiding the design and evolution of the frameworks. Rather than mastering the syntactic idiosyncrasies of any one language become a guru at integrating multiple frameworks to hold your own.
Whether it be AngularJS, EmberJS, Handlebarsjs, Ruby on Rails, Springs or PrimeFaces be ready to learn their conventions and know when to swap one for the other or combine them all.
While I don't agree that visual programming is going be a revolution anytime soon. GUI builders are nice to have but most programming still remains text dependent.
This has been predicted for many years, it's slowly happening with some -- though not all -- code. Some programming continues to be very textual, but some is becoming more visual, which means the underlying computer language doesn't matter as much.
7 reasons why frameworks are the new programming languages is well worth the read.
Written by
Nneko Branche.