When I first started out with Symfony, I was shocked at how little instruction was available about how to build common features.
Then I discovered that Symfony was built on the premise of un-opinionated programming. Essentially, this means that they don’t tell you how to do things, they let you decide. This is a perfectly valid approach.
And yet, the outcome of this choice is unexpected.
In offsetting the opinion to the developer, there is an implicit requirement of expertise for that developer to make informed decisions. The alternative is making uninformed decisions, which I think we can safely say will end in a mess.
But essentially, this is the unintended outcome of choosing an un-opinionated approach, in order to use Symfony you must be an expert in Symfony or you’ll create a mess.
To add more ironic to the situation, the few people that come up with tutorials, articles or any instruction showing people a way of doing things are considered to be discrediting the un-opinionated approach. Irony squared!
It’s like providing an education system where the teachers only present the data of what happened with no interpretation or analysis, (option) but then also whacking an individual that has the nerve to voice their own opinion. Smells like Communism to me!
Is it an option that readability, maintainability and reduced technical debt is better for your codebase? No, and yet, making any choice as to which tools to include is optioned.
But how can we measure time and/or money saved due to an architectural choice or coding standards catching an error before it even makes it to the codebase?
We can’t, It’s unmeasurable. We would have to know all the potential problems that each problem would lead to, and their outcomes and then somehow calculate the cost.
Therefore, we can’t measure meaningfully the benefits of an opinionated approach.
Honestly, I can see where this has come from, the era before Symfony saw a plethora of opinionated frameworks and they went too far. So the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction and balance must be restored.