Frameworks are the way forward in my opinion. I'm personally sick of rewriting code that I know is already available and that has been tested thoroughly. After all, how many of us write unit tests, follow strict code conventions, and strive for efficiency while developing our code?

When you use a framework, all this is taken care of for you. Frameworks, well, the Zend Framework, uses best practices too, by that I mean it implements design patterns, tight coupling, and all the other advanced theories and practices - which I am personally still learning, so for me, it's good to see how all these practices work together.

I'm still in the process of deciding whether to dive into the Zend Framework, my work partner is against it, but I feel that's only due to a lack of understanding of these practices and how difficult it is to actually produce and maintain such a large framework.

In fact, I think this is a big problem within programming. A lot of people are just too stubborn and think they can code it better themselves (I too used to be that person). Recently, however, I've realised the errors of my ways.

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Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.