[thanatropism]

I don't think Norvig is too worried about giving pep rallies.

At any rate: lately I've been having to interact at work with some folks from another company whose entire outlook of what "programming" is revolves around web CRUD stuff and some interactive-looking front-end... web stuff. So "I learned some new programming skills" to them is closer to "I learned how to make an HTML5 caroussel using jquery and Laravel" than "I learned how to calculate road distances using GIS LineStrings and Djikstra's algorithm". Their whole world looks like a CMS. There's a threshold of "meta" they cannot cross.

I think this is both why PHP is so popular and so despised: it attracts people who wouldn't be able to grok concepts at a higher level of abstraction (say, Python @decorators) so they don't need it. PHP -- and really, Laravel, whatever that is -- is all they need.

[Anthony-G]

As a system administrator, I’m regularly amazed by the number of web developers who have little or no understanding of HTTP, the protocol that underlies the bulk of their work. Many don’t know even know what a transport protocol is in the first place. They know that most form submissions (or AJAX requests) should be POST and that some can be GET but they don’t know that these are HTTP methods.

I’ve had to teach quite a few people the basics of HTTP: a user-agent makes a request and a server replies with a response, that both requests and responses are composed of a header and an (optional) body, and some of the important information that might be included in the headers (cookies, character encoding, caching information, etc.).

[cat199]

... also process context / managment / residency / systems level architecture

everything is running synchronously in the current thread on the same machine (or can be roughly abstracted as a single machine where all backend is simply 'invisible')

like a tv.