Many people think that learning a programming language begins and ends with the language itself. They don’t consider learning a UI framework a part of the experience, or maybe see it as an optional skill. However, UI frameworks actually carry a host of benefits that can enhance your programming. For one, a UI framework provides you with more tools that will enable you to get the most out of your program as efficiently as possible. What would normally take 50 lines of code you could accomplish in 10. Another benefit is that UI frameworks make the code more concise. It is a lot easier for you or someone else to read your program if the syntax is simple to understand and the code is as short as possible. Lastly, while learning a UI framework will take a long time to learn, it will pay off in the long run as all future programming projects will take significantly less time to complete.
Learning Semantic UI alongside HTML and CSS was very helpful for me as it enabled someone with little experience in both languages to create modern style web pages. The tools that were provided with Semantic UI made it very easy to format the web page, change the colors of different objects, and insert images in any size. With raw HTML and CSS programming it took a lot of code just to make a 1980’s style web page with really bad formatting, so I’m very grateful that I am able to create a modern web page with the same amount of code.
I believe that Software Engineers must learn a UI framework, especially in the programming language that they mainly code in. The only con to learning a UI framework is that it takes time to learn it. However, that con is heavily outweighed by the many pros that I explained previously. I think that it will also help Software Engineers to better broaden their skill set and maybe they can even learn new things about the programming language by using a UI framework.