| > Being "good" has nothing to do with being a back-end programmer, imho That's a tough one. As I see it, a lot of the complexity in frontends is in framework feature bloat, subpar tooling and high tech churn as compared to backends. In a word: immaturity. Frontend doesn't guarantee backcompat like backend technologies do, which is also a large part of the (unnecessary) complexity. Obviously, frontends are additionally subject to the whims of fashion in a way that doesn't apply to backends. In contrast, backends have mature frameworks that can deal with most concerns, allowing the developer to operate on a higher level and with greater confidence in the basic nuts and bolts. Package management is generally sane, to boot. How much less complex would frontend be if we weren't trying to cram applications into a document model and instead had built-in support for controls/components, theming, data binding and inter-component events? If JavaScript didn't have so many shortcomings or perhaps even gradual typing? In my experience, frontend skews young whereas backend skews older. That leads to junior class errors in frontends, such as not understanding the benefit of type annotations in a dynamic language and general cowboy behaviour. Perhaps the latter is also down to the general "move fast and break things" approach in JS land. My own conclusion is backend developers as a group tend to be better, but that's mainly by virtue of having more experience under the belt, being less impatient and taking a longer view. |