Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)
Timely. I am kind of old-school when it comes to game development and recently got into teaching my daughter maths and programming and art through it. It&#x27;s been a lot of fun.<p>Buuuuuut.... the early stages of starting game development these days are, &quot;What engine do you use?&quot;<p>And honestly it can be a daunting choice. They&#x27;re all quite large and have their own jargon and way of doing things. I can get through a &quot;Hello, world!&quot; tutorial in an afternoon but it&#x27;ll take months before I get something useful to work and load my brain with all of the jargon to navigate the documentation and forums...<p>versus writing everything from scratch. It&#x27;s a slower start but I have already learned a good programming language and can go from there. I don&#x27;t end up with a black box of performance problems. Nor do I end up trying to shoe-horn my round game into a square peg. It&#x27;s quite common going down this route to write your own data formats and tools as well: level editors, compilers, debuggers. And the productivity starts going up fast as you build momentum.<p>So I typically go a &quot;libraries not frameworks&quot; kind of approach.<p>Which seems to be entirely alien in the enterprise world. The common wisdom here is to never write your own tools. Always use what&#x27;s on the shelf and get going as fast as possible. Yet I often end up in those tar pits where cloud costs overrun operating budgets and failures happen constantly without any built-in observability... I wonder why more teams <i>don&#x27;t</i> build tools for themselves?<p>Is it not as uncommon as I think?