Among the guys at Meteor, we've built a lot of apps already in the past. For example, I wrote EtherPad. So you could say we're extracting from our extensive collective experience.
Do development frameworks built for their own sake ever really work in the wild?
It's hard to say what technologies were or weren't "built for their own sake." You can't invent good tools and abstractions without taking the cues from somewhere. That doesn't mean a new kind of hammer has to come out of a particular kitchen renovation, or a new kind of detergent has to come out of a single load of laundry. We're deeply embedded in a community of people who do the same things over and over, and we think we know what the next set of tools should look like. Was SQL extracted from some particular app? How about Heroku, Parse, or jQuery? HTML? In most cases you could probably frame the story either way.
I think we're really talking about the "over-engineering" stereotype. Even saying we're working full time on a framework can set off that alarm. Oh no, that's too much engineering! Don't worry, we'll keep it under control.
Do development frameworks built for their own sake ever really work in the wild?
It's hard to say what technologies were or weren't "built for their own sake." You can't invent good tools and abstractions without taking the cues from somewhere. That doesn't mean a new kind of hammer has to come out of a particular kitchen renovation, or a new kind of detergent has to come out of a single load of laundry. We're deeply embedded in a community of people who do the same things over and over, and we think we know what the next set of tools should look like. Was SQL extracted from some particular app? How about Heroku, Parse, or jQuery? HTML? In most cases you could probably frame the story either way.
I think we're really talking about the "over-engineering" stereotype. Even saying we're working full time on a framework can set off that alarm. Oh no, that's too much engineering! Don't worry, we'll keep it under control.