[mekoka]

"It will grow more complex" is never a good reason to get into things early. It's just your mind playing FOMO tricks on you.

Many developers who picked up the web in the early years struggle with (front-end) web development today. It doesn't matter if they fetched jQuery or MooTools from some CDN as it was done in the mid 00s. Once the tooling became too complicated and ever changing they couldn't keep up as front-end dilettante. It required to commit as professionals.

If you started today, you'd simply learn the hard way, as it's always been done: get a few books or register for a course. Carve some time every day for theory and practice. All the while prioritizing what matters the most to get stuff done quickly right now, with little fluff. You will not learn Grunt, Bower, and a large array of historic tech. You'll go straight for what's relevant today. That applies to abstractions, frameworks, and tooling, but also to the fundamentals. You'll probably learn ES6+ and TS, not JS WAT. A lot of the early stuff seems like an utter waste of time in retrospect.

This is true for all tech. If you knew nothing about LLMs by the end of this year, you could find a course that teaches you all the latest relevant tricks in 5 to 10 hours for 10 bucks.

[apsurd]

No, 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.

[mekoka]

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.

[sarchertech]

This sounds exactly right. I'm someone who learned the web back when IE6 was something we wished everyone was on, and also someone who learned the fundamentals of the web and CS in general enough to try writing a book about it to teach everyone else.

Picking up the web early didn't help with the latter. I spent most of my early time memorizing tips and tricks that only applied to old browsers. I didn't pick up the fundamentals till I went back to school for CS and took a networking class.

[apsurd]

web fundamentals and web development fundamentals are different.

How HTML, CSS and javascript come together is extremely relevant to developers 20 years ago and today.

I do support and agree with the parent comment, see the discussion, but I do credit getting into web development when it was raw and open paid dividends for me. Todays ecosystem is opaque in comparison. You don't think there's more friction today?

[sarchertech]

HTML CSS and JavaScript are just a small subset of web development.

And yes understanding them is still relevant. But when I started I was spending more time memorizing the the quirks of IE6 than I was learning how JavaScript, CSS, and HTML come together.

I think it you start directly in react you don’t learn the layer below it sure. But there’s no reason you have to start leaning react. There’s nothing inherent about starting today that forces you to start directly with React. You could start building a static webpage. And if you did that it would be easier and more fundamental than if you did that same thing 20 years ago because you can ignore most of the non-standard browser quirks.

[apsurd]

Good points and thoughtful reply.

You're right, fundamentals are distilled, so to think they are free just by getting in early is likely backwards. And earning one's professional chops doesn't stop or start based on when you enter.

Web dev definitely is nostalgic. I miss the early days but I also conveniently erased ie6, binding data to HTML, the need for backbone and jQuery to do anything. hmmm yeah doesn't matter when you start, it's all a grind if you dig deep enough.

[mekoka]

> I also conveniently erased ie6

Also known as PTSD-induced amnesia, haha. We all tried to forget.

[bdangubic]

> Once the tooling became too complicated and ever changing they couldn't keep up as front-end dilettante. It required to commit as professionals.

The best professionals did not fall for insanity of the modern front-end dilettante and continued hacking shit without that insanitity.

> You will not learn Grunt, Bower, and a large array of historic tech. You'll go straight for what's relevant today.

which will be outdated "tomorrow" just like grunt/bower... are looked at today

> A lot of the early stuff seems like an utter waste of time in retrospect.

This cannot be further from the truth, if you learned Javascript early, like really learned it, that mastery gets you far today. The best front-end devs I know are basically Javascript developers, everything else is "tech du jour" that comes and goes and the less of it you invest in the better off you'll be in the long-run.

> If you knew nothing about LLMs by the end of this year, you could find a course that teaches you all the latest relevant tricks in 5 to 10 hours for 10 bucks.

Hard disagree with this unless you are doing simple CRUD-like stuff

[mekoka]

> The best professionals did not fall for insanity of the modern front-end dilettante and continued hacking shit without that insanitity.

"Front-end professional" and "no tooling" have been exclusive propositions since the early 2010s. You either learned to use tools or you were out of the loop.

> which will be outdated "tomorrow" just like grunt/bower... are looked at today

Not really. Historically, the main problem with front-end development has not been change, but the pace of it. That's how it ties in with the current discussion regarding the (now) ever-changing terrain of LLM-assisted coding. Front-end development is still changing today, but it's coalescing and congealing more than it's revolving. The chasms between transitions are narrowing. If you observe how long Webpack lasted and familiarity with it carried over to using Vite, it's somewhat safe to expect that the latter will last even longer and that its replacement will be a near copy. Someone putting time to learn front-end skills today might reap the benefits of that investment longer.

> if you learned Javascript early, like really learned it, that mastery gets you far today.

I did. I got a copy of the Rhino book 4th ed. and read it cover to cover. I would not advise to learn JS today with historical references. JS was not designed like most other languages. It was hastily put together to get things done and it had a lot of "interesting", but ultimately undesirable, artifacts. It only slowly turned into a more sensible standard after-the-fact. Yes, there are some parts that are still in its core identity, but a lot in the implementation has changed. Efforts like "Javascript: The Good Parts", further standardization, and TS helped to slowly turn it into what we know today. You don't need to travel back in time for that mastery. Get a modern copy of the Rhino book and you'll be as good as the best of them.

[aquariusDue]

Yeah, I still get use out of XMLHttpRequest to this day good thing I got in early and variable hoisting isn't gonna get me! /s

A lot of snark aside there's a bit of a false dichotomy (I think) here at work. Whenever or wherever your jumping in point is into $something it will always pay dividends to learn the fundamentals of that $something well and unless you interact with older iterations on that $something then you'll never have to bother learning the equivalent of Grunt, Gulp, Stylus, Nunjuncks and so on for that $something.

With that being said it's also good to put aside time once a year to check out a good recommended (and usually paid) course from an established professional aimed at busy professionals.

As for LLMs I feel it's slowly becoming a thing big enough where people will have to consider where to focus their energy starting with 2027. Kinda like some people branched from web development into backend, frontend and UI/UX a good while back. Do you want to get good at using Claude Code or do you want to integrate gen AI features at work for coworkers to use or customers/users? It's still early days just like when NodeJS started gaining a lot of traction and people were making fun of leftpad.