You assume a lot. What makes you think novel programmers don't get taught (either by teachers, professors, a book, or an online tutorial) the basics? A teaching

You assume a lot. What makes you think novel programmers don't get taught (either by teachers, professors, a book, or an online tutorial) the basics? A teaching institution that teaches their students how to use frameworks so as to put buzzwords on their CVs instead of the core concepts is an incredibly poor one. I certainly agree that, for want of a better term, the NIH syndrome is the best way to learn to program―you don't learn to run before you walk, neither do you learn the structure of sentences before you learn to spell. > I wrote a PHP social network. [...] How would a newbie do that nowadays? They'd install cakePHP or Django or Rails, getting them a DBA layer, templating, MVC all written for them. They would? They could. At the same time, however, I wouldn't say it's that bad. Do you understand how your kernel handles networking for you? Memory management? There are a lot of abstractions that make programming simpler; complex is rarely better. Getting tangled up in all the small details hinders much more than it helps. Frameworks, eh. It wasn't long ago that all programming was done in assembly language...