It means there is a shared idiomatic approach across your team and all the documentation for it is just the framework documentation. It is also easier to hire devs, if you can vet their ability to write idiomatic code in a specific framework then you can better assume they will mesh well with yor codebase.
It is a communication and empathy problem at its heart. You are being empathetic to future devs and future you by acknowledging the knowledge they would need to work on your code. Then the communication of your idioms is baked into the framework ecosystem and docs.
I'd say there's quite a bit "special" about all of these attributes, at least enough to warrant careful consideration.
Don't let bad frameworks represent all frameworks. That is a faulty generalization [0].
If you qualify this advice to the point where it actually becomes useful it turns into, "Use code written by other people that doesn't suck." And that, of course, is indeed a good idea, but it's a lot easier said than done.
But despite that caveat, there do exist frameworks out there today that speed up development for some developers. Whether one has the time or energy or will to audit them to find one that works best for them (or learn that none of them do) is up to the individual.
I bring this up because many of us on this website are at times infected by NIH syndrome and think we can do better than a dedicated team of experienced front-end developers. And it's likely true for many frameworks, but not all. Additionally, we may want to extend that attitude to our workplace where our peers and bosses likely value development speed and cross-project consistency over code performance.
I used to eschew any and all frameworks, but now I realize that my values have changed. Projects like Svelte give me hope for a better future for front-end development.
Of course. But there also exist frameworks that will slow development down. For any X in {frameworks, languages, operating systems, libraries} there exist X's that will be helpful and X's that will not, and so "use an X" by itself is not helpful advice for any X. You have to use a good X, but that isn't helpful either because it just begs the question.
I just intended to push back against the notion that frameworks should not be considered.
It's not about code quality at all, it actually doesn't matter that much if the framework is excellent or just okay to reap the main benefit, which is knowledge diffusion through the team and having a set of agreed upon idioms that there's no need to bike shed over. Not every team has a software architect skillset so it's a bit of a risk hedge as well.
There's no need to argue over implementation details, you waste less time onboarding new staff and you have that rich ecosystem of docs and community of solved problems.
That's all. There are great reasons to build your own software but if you're working in a team I feel it's an easier experience to use a known framework. Also a bit more responsible from a business risk management perspective, since you don't have as big of a "bus problem". Only your business logic is trapped inside your org.
LOL: so did you read TFA, or just come up with this yourself?
Should Spartacus have tried reforming the Roman society? Should the French have tried reforming the feudal society? Should the Greeks have tried reforming the Ottoman Empire? Should the Russians have tried reforming the Tsarist regime?
Sometimes in history, the thing is just rotten. There is no way to keep going forward without a clean slate, without completely throwing away the things that are keeping you back.
As for the other two ... maybe the people of those countries would have endured less suffering afterwards if they had reformed rather than revolted?
The war of independence the 13 American colonies waged against Britain is generally called "The American Revolution", but yes, for some reason most other wars of independence aren't called revolutions -- for instance while there was a Mexican revolution in the early 20th century, the earlier war of independence against Spain is just called the "Mexican war of independence" (Guerra de Independencia de México)
Well, the English AFAIK have done exactly that, haven't they?
Did you read the article? He says what you wrote explicitly, in fact there is an entire section on it.
This is also the core motivation behind all of the schemes to force a single coding style on all developers at the cost of performance and usually with an extremely complicated design for seemingly no reason. Usually, these turn out to be unreadable messes as well a generation later once everybody has moved onto the latest and "greatest" coding style trend.
Instead of doing rewrites, you can just refactor code. That means, among other things, deleting obsolete code for platforms you no longer support and, in the case of C/C++, converting macros to functions. You can also document the codebase (with comments not commit messages) so that developers understand what the code does and why it is there. But a full rewrite is usually a bad idea that will just introduce new bugs and remove existing functionality.
Refactor vs rewrite is basically the software development equivalent of reform vs revolution in political science and everybody with even a minimal knowledge of history knows that revolutions usually end badly with an even worse regime taking power. Likewise, the failure to accept the need for reform (i.e. refusing to allow refactoring) inevitably leads to revolution.