alt Hacker News"It will grow more complex" is never a good reason to get into things early. It's just your mind playing FOMO tricks on you.
Many developers who picked up the web in the early years struggle with (front-end) web development today. It doesn't matter if they fetched jQuery or MooTools from some CDN as it was done in the mid 00s. Once the tooling became too complicated and ever changing they couldn't keep up as front-end dilettante. It required to commit as professionals.
If you started today, you'd simply learn the hard way, as it's always been done: get a few books or register for a course. Carve some time every day for theory and practice. All the while prioritizing what matters the most to get stuff done quickly right now, with little fluff. You will not learn Grunt, Bower, and a large array of historic tech. You'll go straight for what's relevant today. That applies to abstractions, frameworks, and tooling, but also to the fundamentals. You'll probably learn ES6+ and TS, not JS WAT. A lot of the early stuff seems like an utter waste of time in retrospect.
This is true for all tech. If you knew nothing about LLMs by the end of this year, you could find a course that teaches you all the latest relevant tricks in 5 to 10 hours for 10 bucks.
Replies
> Once the tooling became too complicated and ever changing they couldn't keep up as front-end dilettante. It required to commit as professionals.
The best professionals did not fall for insanity of the modern front-end dilettante and continued hacking shit without that insanitity.
> You will not learn Grunt, Bower, and a large array of historic tech. You'll go straight for what's relevant today.
which will be outdated "tomorrow" just like grunt/bower... are looked at today
> A lot of the early stuff seems like an utter waste of time in retrospect.
This cannot be further from the truth, if you learned Javascript early, like really learned it, that mastery gets you far today. The best front-end devs I know are basically Javascript developers, everything else is "tech du jour" that comes and goes and the less of it you invest in the better off you'll be in the long-run.
> If you knew nothing about LLMs by the end of this year, you could find a course that teaches you all the latest relevant tricks in 5 to 10 hours for 10 bucks.
Hard disagree with this unless you are doing simple CRUD-like stuff
No, this thread and sub-discussion is about specifically early web fundamentals. The web is special in this sense, it's intentionally long-lived warts and all. So the fundamentals pay outsized dividends. The rube goldberg machine that is modern JS dev still spits out an index.html result.
Being a good professional developer means getting the primitives and the data model not horribly pointed in the wrong direction. So it's extremely helpful to be aware of those primitives. And the argument "nobody is better off knowing web-assembly as a primitive" doesn't hold because as-said the web is literally still html files. It's right there in the source.