Yesterday evening Ruby on Rails came up while talking to my mom, and I decided to try to explain what a framework was. I wound up comparing a framework to a sonnet.
If you’re writing a poem, and you decide to write a sonnet, you have a lot of little things decided for you right away. You now know the length of the poem, and the general structure. You know how long each line will be, and you even have some criteria for the content (iambic pentameter and a certain rhyming scheme). Other than that, you can do whatever you want.
It’s by no means a direct analogy, but because my mom knows what a sonnet is, the concept of a framework made sense to her right away.
I may have overreached just a little to use sonnets as the example. Maybe frameworks are more like limericks. Same idea, though.
