Yes. It’s not that hard, so long as your definition of “basic web app” is server rendered HTML and CSS. I could certainly do that from scratch in Ruby without G

Yes. It’s not that hard, so long as your definition of “basic web app” is server rendered HTML and CSS. I could certainly do that from scratch in Ruby without Google. If I didn’t have Google I wouldn’t want to use Rails - even though I know the framework well, there’s a lot there to remember. But I would expect anyone who is (a) proficient with a high level programming language and (b) has ever built a web app from scratch would be able to say yes to this as well, so long as they get to work in the language they know well. The author of this post specifically does not fit this criteria: > To be fair, I'm not a web developer so I'm not entirely shocked by this. I only have the itch (and time) to throw together a small web app about once every 6 months. Also, JS is part of the problem. Even avoiding the chaotic world of front-end by assuming strict SSR using something like Express, Node would be one of the more difficult ecosystems build in from memory, because JS doesn’t have the level of standard library that most languages do, because it changes so fast, and because it’s drunk the micro package kool-aid so hard (aka left_pad). But for developers fluent in Ruby, Python, Go, Java, PHP, and probably several others, I would think this is a very realistic ask.