I was once at a company (X) that acquired another company (Y), and Y's main product was a graphical programming tool. Y advertised that their tool could speed application development up 10x.
My (nontechnical) manager asked me "why don't you use Y's tool to build the project you're currently working on?" I answered with the following metaphor:
Imagine you have to pick a bike to go on a trip. You're travelling on a well paved road through the woods. If you take a light & narrow wheeled racing bike, you'll travel much much faster than if you ride a knobbly wheeled mountain bike with suspension, as long as you stay on the road. As soon as you need to go off the road and cut a new path, you are going to wish you had that mountain bike, and the road bike is actually going to make you go much slower or just stop altogether.
So does the "speed bike"/advanced framework make you go faster? Yes, as long as you stay on the road (i.e. constrain your requirements to their feature set). The moment you need to "go off-road" (i.e. do something the framework doesn't do), such tools actually make it difficult or impossible to make progress.
This is why, for a complex applications (most commercial software), I prefer the mountain bike. Yes, it's slower on certain paths, but when we need to "go off-road" I don't slow to a stop.
> I VPN in to my home network, ssh into the pi using Terminus on my iphone, and 'aplay' the wav file
Once, when I was working away from home, someone unplugged the phone at home so I couldn't phone in. After becoming very frustrated, I SSH'd into my home server, and from there into the Mac Mini we used as a media station. Then:
- checked they were watching something using `ps`.
- killed that process so I had their attention.
- `say 'this is dad, I'm inside the computer.'`
- `say 'I want to phone you but you have unplugged the phone.'`
My (nontechnical) manager asked me "why don't you use Y's tool to build the project you're currently working on?" I answered with the following metaphor:
Imagine you have to pick a bike to go on a trip. You're travelling on a well paved road through the woods. If you take a light & narrow wheeled racing bike, you'll travel much much faster than if you ride a knobbly wheeled mountain bike with suspension, as long as you stay on the road. As soon as you need to go off the road and cut a new path, you are going to wish you had that mountain bike, and the road bike is actually going to make you go much slower or just stop altogether.
So does the "speed bike"/advanced framework make you go faster? Yes, as long as you stay on the road (i.e. constrain your requirements to their feature set). The moment you need to "go off-road" (i.e. do something the framework doesn't do), such tools actually make it difficult or impossible to make progress.
This is why, for a complex applications (most commercial software), I prefer the mountain bike. Yes, it's slower on certain paths, but when we need to "go off-road" I don't slow to a stop.