Don't Write Frameworks for Dummies

From Domain-Driven Design by Eric Evans:

“Team divisions that assume some developers are not smart enough to design are likely to fail because they underestimate the difficulty of application development. If those people are not smart enough to design, they shouldn’t be assigned to develop software. If they are smart enough, then the attempts to coddle them will only put up barriers between them and the tools they need.

“This attitude also poisons the relationship between teams. I’ve ended up on arrogant teams like this and found myself apologizing to developers in every conversation, embarrassed by my association. (I’ve never managed to change such a team, I’m afraid.)

“Now, encapsulating irrelevant technical detail is completely different from the kind of prepackaging I’m disparaging. A framework can place powerful abstractions and tools in developers’ hands and free them from drudgery. It is hard to describe the difference in a generalized way, but you can tell the difference by asking the framework designers what they expect of the person who will be using the tool/framework/components. If the designers seem to have a high level of respect for the user of the framework, then they are probably on the right track.”

Eric’s book is a great read if you are a Domain-Driven Design convert. My only peeve with it is that it’s a tad too theoretic and doesn’t illustrate concepts with enough code.