There is an art to translating whatever idea you have into large building blocks rather that coding it from small primitives.

Actually knowing how to code is important, but so is knowing how to take a problem and implement it without ever doing anything the framework authors didn't think of.

You might need a nasty hack like exporting a bitmap to a ramdisk and then importing it again to read a pixel value, to avoid messing with some nasty AI, or you might have a case where performance matters and you do want to mess with the buggy undocumented crap API.

It's almost like the idea that language shapes how you think. Frameworks are kind of like subsets or dialects of programming languages. If you actually know the framework well, you can often do stuff that seems like it would need low level control, in an idiomatic way that doesn't fight the framework.

I was thinking of building a Bluetooth device you can leave somewhere that alerts your phone should it be disturbed, as a portable security system. However the PineTime, an open source smartwatch, has all the features needed for $25, cheaper than almost any small quantity prototype.

Not sure if I'll ever get around to that project, but if I do, I probably won't be building any single function hardware just for it, especially not without being sure the whole idea is worth it.

> It's almost like the idea that language shapes how you think. Frameworks are kind of like subsets or dialects of programming languages. If you actually know the framework well, you can often do stuff that seems like it would need low level control, in an idiomatic way that doesn't fight the framework.

I think the analogy does not quite fit. A framework is certainly not a dialect. For me a dialect is a variant of the language in which you can accomplish almost the same.

A framework provides you with a couple of blocks for building something specific.

In terms of language, I'd say a framework is like technical jargon. Additional abstract terms that describe concepts useful in that domain. So domain experts don’t need to always explain everything from the beginning.

A framework is not a dialect, but a business context specific language.

You may re-use normal english words to have a new meaning. a bit like how companies like to have infinite initial acronym's for everything that nobody ever will understand outside the company.