When I finally understood that browsers only understand HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Yes that’s a simplification, but it’s essentially true. Early on in my career

When I finally understood that browsers only understand HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Yes that’s a simplification, but it’s essentially true. Early on in my career when I started more front-end development, I was under the impression that there was somehow much more going on under the hood, i.e., more languages, executables, ways of setting styles and layouts. When this finally clicked with me, it was all so much clearer and immediately less intimidating. I’m still surprised to this day that even many experienced developers think that browsers can natively interpret SCSS, TypeScript, or whatever templating language they’re using — heck, some people even used to call jQuery a “language”. As a relatively new Clojure developer, the meaning of the parentheses was the ah-ha moment. I imagine it’s the same for other Lisp-y languages.