A Non-Technical Guide to Frameworks: What is a Framework?
Programming frameworks are pre-configured coded that help you build applications faster.
Imagine you're coding a web or mobile app and you want to do everything yourself. From scratch.
Authentication, Routing, Homepage, everything. The works.
You get started and perfectly craft your authentication. You struggle but ultimately succeed in creating the best routing system in the world. Your homepage freaking converts, there is nothing better.
Months later, you finally did it. Your perfect app is done. You've learned so much, and you're very proud of yourself.
Sometime later, you have an idea for another application.
Do you do all of the same tasks over again? Or do you leverage what you've already done to start your new project?
If you're not a masochist, you leverage your existing project.
This is the idea of programming frameworks. Leveraging existing tooling for the most common tasks when creating an an application.
Can programmers easily switch between frameworks?
Not easily, but it can be done if they know the underlying code. Programmers usually specialize based on their preferences/market demand.
React, a popular library (framework) by developers at Facebook, leverages Javascript as the underlying language that helps developer make logical, interactive UIs faster.
It leverages HTML and CSS to help build user interfaces the same as building a website with Javascript alone, but thanks to React you have some patterns that help develop better code, faster.