Luciano E. Guerche was recently lamenting the costs of changing frameworks, especially within the Microsoft world. He said:

If you want Winforms app to turn a WPF app? Rewrite it from scratch? Come on M$...

To which I replied:

(re)Writing from scratch enables you to avoid the bugs in the original app and write brand new ones! (yes, bugs)

It was tongue in cheek and very reminiscent of an old saw about bugs in code:

Every program has at least one bug and can be shortened by at least one instruction  from which, by induction, one can deduce that every program can be reduced to one instruction which doesn't work.

But it also had a couple of truths in it. Frameworks are wonderful things. Engineers and architects use frameworks all the time. The Statue of Liberty is copper over an internal framework of steel. But changing that framework isn't easy. And the same thing applies to writing code.

Microsoft has a litany of Frameworks, three letter acronyms that end in F (WCF, WPF, etc) and all designed to help programmers "not have to be plumbers". And I'm all for not having to re-do the internal plumbing every time, but that doesn't mean I need a framework. Frameworks are like jigsaw puzzle pieces and they only tend to go together one way and they build the exact same thing each time. What I, as a programmer, need is a set of tools like Legos or Tinker Toys or Lincoln Logs. And the beauty of all three of those items just mentioned is I can and have used them together to make some incredible things.

Not only that, if a part of it doesn't work for what I need any more, I can dismantle that one part and change it without having to rebuild the entire structure, which is what Luciano was complaining about.

Just my .02 for today