alt Hacker NewsNo, 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 assembly as a primitive" doesn't hold because as-said the web is literally still html files. It's right there in the source.
The discussion is centered around the idea that "adopting early" provides some future proofing in a rapidly evolving (and largely non-standard) terrain. I share the FA's position that it does not.
> The web is special in this sense, it's intentionally long-lived warts and all. So the fundamentals pay outsized dividends.
Fundamentals pay dividends, but what makes you think that what you learn as an early adopter are fundamentals? Fundamentals are knowledge that is deemed intemporal, not "just discovered".
The historical web and its simplicity are as available to anyone today as it was back then. People can still learn HTML today and make table-based layouts. HTML is still HTML, whether you learned it then or today. But if back then you intended to become a professional front-end developer, you would still have to contend with the tremendous difficulties that some seem to have forgotten out of nostalgia. You'd soon have to also learn CSS in its early and buggy drafts, then (mostly non-standard) JavaScript (Netscape and IE6) and the multiple browser bugs that required all kinds of hacks and shims. Then you'd have to keep up with the cycles of changing front-end tools and practices, as efforts to put some sense into the madness were moved there. Much in all that knowledge went nowhere since it was not always part of a progression, but rather a set of competing cycles.
Fundamentals are indisputably relevant, but they're knowledge that emerges as victorious after all the fluff of uncertainty has been left behind. Front-end development is only now settling into that phase. With LLMs we're still figuring out where we're going.