[ksec]

>“wow, I didn’t realize you could actually do anything useful with just plain JavaScript in the browser. I thought it was like... assembly or something.”

Wow. These two sentences completely capture modern day Web Development, Javascript as assembly.

>I think there’s a lot of that in front end world today.

In modern Web development, ( and in possibly all area of software development ), instead of making things simpler ( not easier ), it seems we have been building premature abstraction after abstraction.

[brlewis]

FWIW, the first conference where I heard speakers talk about learning JavaScript first before leaning on a framework, was jQuery 2008.

Frameworks are not inherently premature abstractions, but can be used that way.

[rbanffy]

It's always good advice to start with the conceptually simplest tech you can get away with.