Other programmer’s bugs are boring

Frameworks like Symfony, or Grails, or Ruby on Rails, can be useful to businesses for all the reasons I talked about in “Why software frameworks are beneficial to clients“. However, to a programmer, a framework is only useful to the extent that it works. A framework with a lot of bugs is a time killer. I worked on my own framework from 2002 to 2008. I then switched to Symfony. I think working with another programmers code is boring, but I do it for all the reasons that I talked about in my earlier essay.

This week I ran into a problem with the command doctrine:build-schema. This command should be able to reflect on my database tables and generate the yaml schema file for Symfony. However, it did not work. I scanned many forums looking for answers. I tried countless variations on the schema. I finally got this to work by removing all the foreign key constraints from the schema. I can not find any web page anywhere that suggests that this is necessary, and yet this is what I had to do.

I have spent all month fighting with the Symfony framework. To get the templates to work the way we want for Tailor Made Answers, I’ve had to hack into the core Symfony files. Some programmers warned me not to do this because it means I can not upgrade Symfony. Well, I can upgrade Symfony, I will only need to alter this one core file. But all the same, I do not want to upgrade Symfony. I think I want to get away from it.

Writing my own code is exciting. Struggling with other’s people code is boring. But we all use other people’s code, because other people have kindly provided so much good code to work with. I rely on Linux and MySql and PHP, and I’m glad so many other people have put time into building these software packages. But I rely on them because, 99% of the time, they work, and therefore they save me time. But then, sometimes they do not save me time. The limits of search in MySql has lead me to consider using PostGreSql. The limits of PHP has me thinking constantly about switching to Clojure. Of all the technology that I use, only Linux is so stable and reliable that I never think of replacing it with anything else. I mean the Linux kernel of course – there are many individual packages available on Linux that am considering replacing.

I am torn between waiting for Symfony to mature, versus switching over to something else.