[slimsag]

It's also become much less accessible to your average every-day person.

I remember in 2001 my brother's community college in rural America taught HTML and Flash development. Not only could you learn to make websites quickly, but you were learning technology that was exactly what you would be using when working at a company.

You could argue the technology is better these days, but it's certainly not more clear to newcomers. I recently described to my younger sister that she should learn React through FreeCodeCamp in order to make websites - but suddenly you are dropped into a world talking about declarative programming paradigms, unidirectional data flows, and lots of other foreign concepts described as magic (the virtual DOM, Babel, etc.)

If my experience had been this growing up I would have never gained interest in learning the specifics / details of what was going on when writing HTML/CSS/JS code. I would've chalked it up to "there are layers upon layers of magical things I don't understand, I guess I only need to interact with them and slap them together."

I also think the incentives have changed - it's less about making something cool and sharing it with your internet friends these days because there is money to be made - it's about buffing your GitHub profile to get a job, creating a startup that extracts $$$ from people, etc.

I feel it is very similar to early days YouTube vs. YouTube these days, and that saddens me.

[onion2k]

I would've chalked it up to "there are layers upon layers of magical things I don't understand, I guess I only need to interact with them and slap them together."

That's fine though.

If someone learns C++ today without knowing any ASM very few people would tell them they're "doing it wrong". If someone learns Unreal Blueprints without learning C++ senior game developers still see them as productive game developers. If someone writes a great GLSL shader on shadertoy without knowing how to use WebGL that's OK too. You don't have to understand all the layers in order to use them and make good stuff.

The web is no different. I see no reason why people can't just concentrate on learning the top level abstraction to make things until they encounter a problem that they need to know more about the lower levels to solve. They might never have that problem.

All of this "You have to learn the underlying tech in order to use the framework on top of it" just sounds like gatekeeping to me.

[wormik]

This approach leads us exactly where we are - having 100x more HW resources, yet page load times still suck ;) And simple request to webdev - would you please make your js app build any faster then 5min always yields the same, confused look - like, where in the mess of 100+ libs should I start?

[onion2k]

This approach leads us exactly where we are - having 100x more HW resources, yet page load times still suck ;)

Load times have remained pretty much flat for the past decade despite page weight and page complexity going up. I think the fact they haven't got worse is a good thing.

[TedDoesntTalk]

> "You have to learn the underlying tech in order to use the framework on top of it" just sounds like gatekeeping to me.

Possibly. But if you want to master your craft, you need to learn the “underlying tech.” That’s why we have computer science degrees, after all. Not all programmers have computer science degrees and in many cases, it shows. Someone who understands fundamentals is often more effective at debugging and problem solving when the s* hits the fan.

If you just want to bootcamp it without a deep-dive, that’s fine and I agree with you.

[onion2k]

Not all programmers have computer science degrees and in many cases, it shows.

Some programmers do have computer science degrees, and in many cases it doesn't show. In my experience whether or not someone has a computer science degree is a very poor indicator of how good a developer they are.

[ghaff]

It depends what your objective is. This thread started around the question of how accessible putting up a website is to the average person these days. And there's no reason to become a "full-stack" developer in order to do that--unless you want to for other reasons.

And it's pretty easy to host some basic HTML/CSS and even easier to just go directly with a blogging platform or something like Square Space.

[Multicomp]

>All of this "You have to learn the underlying tech in order to use the framework on top of it" just sounds like gatekeeping to me.

I might be putting words in GPs mouth, but I read the comments as 'making a swf and embedding it in a HTML file used to be good enough. Now everything is way more complicated'.

I tend to agree with GP. Flash and it's desktop counterparts Delphi etc certainly had their warts but they were much more intuitive on the wetware. Such that accountants and non professional / semipro users could use them.

We made a mistake by throwing them out, when we IMHO should have corrected them or replaced them with less warty programs that we're still using the same paradigm to be easy and intuitive to create.

[WWLink]

There isn't really anything stopping people from making simple HTML/CSS/JS code, and I think it'd be nice if more people did that. Instead of thinking about how one could grow something, it'd be nice to think about how simple and efficient one can make something.

[egeozcan]

Totally agree. People jump into extreme abstractions (React, Vue, Angular, when even jQuery is too much at the beginning) when they never experiment with the fundamentals. Using just HTML/CSS is so much fun, even better with the latest advancements, why not enjoy them while learning, instead of getting depressed in totally abstracted frameworks?

[mvonballmo]

People want to be able to create stuff that looks just as good and is as smooth as what professionals are making without learning anything that they basically don't already know. That has definitely changed.

In the old days, it didn't matter how _good_ you were; basically, your site was going to look more or less like the site created by someone who just started and tried really hard for a few days. You could copy/paste HTML from other people's sites _and just have it_. Now, nothing works because there are tokens and authorization and APIs everywhere.

I don't see anyone complaining that you can't just build a car from scratch in your garage. That would be crazy, right? Yet, somehow, anyone should be able to learn how to code professional internet software with little effort and understanding.

If you want to use React, I don't understand what's so hard about the [introductory documentation](https://reactjs.org/docs/add-react-to-a-website.html)? It's almost pure HTML and has [a lot of help](https://reactjs.org/docs/getting-started.html#try-react) for extending it from there.

This is honestly a lot easier than what we had at the beginning, where even documentation for HTML tags wasn't so easy to find.

Maybe this is still too complicated, but the lower bar is there, whether you like it or not. If I don't know how to use scissors, I'm going to be a shitty barber.

[searchableguy]

This is certainly biased. I have had far better programmers than me express their distaste about jsx and how it feels confusing for them to use. For starters, you can't use any statements inside JSX so you would need to learn expression replacements for statements. To understand this limitation, you need to understand jsx factory and what jsx is translated to.

Check this issue: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/11609

Many functional aspects of react can be hard to grok. HOC and currying isn't obvious to everyone.

The surrounding tooling sure is complex af and the little inconsistencies in how everyone does things in the community doesn't help. If the person wants to keep themselves to using a blackbox, they will face problems with react at some point which will force them to learn about how all of this works. React will introduce performance issues that normal js/html/css can easily forget about if you are not careful. Then you will need to learn about lifecycles, debugging tools, and lot of other things simply to make your app not suck.

[wolco]

There is a reason why React pays well. Why it's a good choice for managing complexity.

But you might be too far down the rabbit hole. To use react involves learning a series of things (npm/react/command line). To use Jquery copy 5 lines. It is so easy to get started and so simple to work with.

JQuery is the right choice when you are not managing complexity. When you want a simple powerful abstraction. It's usually the right choice for non-programmers who want to do a few things. It's a good choice for programmers who are not building applications.

[bigbassroller]

- I recently described to my younger sister that she should learn React through FreeCodeCamp in order to make websites

The last thing I would tell him/her is to learn React to build a website. A web app sure. But not a website. Instead I would recommend going to the local community college and learn HTML/CSS (and god forbid some WordPress) and while attending community college start forming your tech circle of fellow hopeful web developers and enjoy the journey.

[OJFord]

> HTML and Flash development. Not only could you learn to make websites quickly, but you were learning technology that was exactly what you would be using when working at a company.

> learn React

IMO that's not the same. Just change Flash for JS, it's still exactly the same technology you would be using when working at a company.

Sure, there's a whole load of ~crap~ tooling built on top of JS to learn too, but I'm sure there was for Flash. It's still the same at its core.

[ricksharp]

I think the environment has changed because of mobile. We had to figure out how to make things work on more than an always connected browser. Also it’s not all read-only info anymore.

But even so, with things like netlify, expo, etc. creating an interactive web or mobile app is not any more difficult.

In fact, with netlify, I could have a website publicially visible without all the horrible custom web management uis of the past (like cpanel).

If all that is needed is a simple html page, that’s literally minutes of following a few instructions and you are up in running.

Perhaps the problem is that there are so many options now that we have paralysis from too many choices. But the role of the teacher is to find the right tools that enable this easily.