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This argument basically boils down to saying "frameworks are monolithic, and hence not flexible enough".

I agree completely with this, the best antidote to this IMHO are the ideas from the lecture "Simple Made Easy" by Rich Hickey http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy

He argues for an approach to framework development where all the different parts of the framework need to be 100% independent and interchangeable. Essentially, instead of a framework you should have 20-30 different libraries that can fully stand on their own but can be combined to give a framework-like result. You can call it the "Chinese Menu" approach to frameworks.

To see this approach in action, look at the different libraries for Clojure server-side development (Ring, Compojure, etc) which consist of tiny interchangeable libraries for specific tasks.

The new full-stack Pedestal framework also follows this philosophy (and in fact I am sure the Pedestal designers expect large chunks of this framework to be discarded as new approaches are tried withing their system, but the plug-and-play nature of all their libraries allows for effortless swapping of component libraries.) http://pedestal.io/




> tiny interchangeable libraries for specific tasks.

So, the UNIX folks had a good idea, then.




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