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1. System configuration has always been the bottleneck to learning programming, so much so that the first sentence of paulg's learn to program guide is this:

1. System configuration has always been the bottleneck to learning programming, so much so that the first sentence of paulg's learn to program guide is this: Find a friend who knows how to program. Get them to set you up with a system where you can edit and run programs http://www.paulgraham.com/pfaq.html 2. Javascript has been good to me, but NodeJS, webpack and the community around it has been particularly bad for this. The move by maintainers towards lower configuration, more opinionated tools is a good step in the right direction, but many people who are general experts in web standards have been shut out of the web's main programming language over the last 5 years or so.

an1sotropy 5y ago
I'm curious about "many people who are general experts in web standards have been shut out" - can you explain more?
- awkward 5y ago
  As frontend development has gone towards the "developer fontend", meaning complex technologies that focus on complex state management tasks with complicated configuring workflows, there has been a large number of people with layout, css and design skills that have been pushed out of implementation roles. Many companies increasingly have workforces that split cross browser compliance and javascript implementation roles - the skill level required for frontend tools like react/redux creates a large barrier for upskilling devs.
  - an1sotropy 5y ago
    ok, got it. I wonder if "skill level" is even the right word: it is a huge time sink to learn it, but afterwards are you actually more "skilled"? I've had to interact with React experts who had no idea how to generalize their understanding to other problems, or understood that React was solving problems that other (non-web) systems have been solving for decades.
    - awkward 5y ago
      Framework devs getting sorted into "high skill" without knowing core web skills is definitely the other side of the problem. By high skill I meant more of a steep learning curve - there isn't much a developer without a significant understanding of the framework can do.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
gopher_space 5y ago
The best shops I've worked at have all either walked you through setting up your dev environment or had it ready for you to explore on day one.
jfengel 5y ago
I often say that the hardest program I ever write is "Hello, world". Once the program is running, I can modify it to make it do whatever I want. I now understand its rules and am in the domain of ordinary programming. But if a program doesn't even run, the set of things that is wrong is vast. And it's hard to Google, because the symptoms are usually something akin to "nothing happens". I can mess with things all day, many of which will make nothing happen differently.

an1sotropy 5y ago

I'm curious about "many people who are general experts in web standards have been shut out" - can you explain more?

awkward 5y ago
As frontend development has gone towards the "developer fontend", meaning complex technologies that focus on complex state management tasks with complicated configuring workflows, there has been a large number of people with layout, css and design skills that have been pushed out of implementation roles. Many companies increasingly have workforces that split cross browser compliance and javascript implementation roles - the skill level required for frontend tools like react/redux creates a large barrier for upskilling devs.
- an1sotropy 5y ago
  ok, got it. I wonder if "skill level" is even the right word: it is a huge time sink to learn it, but afterwards are you actually more "skilled"? I've had to interact with React experts who had no idea how to generalize their understanding to other problems, or understood that React was solving problems that other (non-web) systems have been solving for decades.
  - awkward 5y ago
    Framework devs getting sorted into "high skill" without knowing core web skills is definitely the other side of the problem. By high skill I meant more of a steep learning curve - there isn't much a developer without a significant understanding of the framework can do.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

gopher_space 5y ago

The best shops I've worked at have all either walked you through setting up your dev environment or had it ready for you to explore on day one.

jfengel 5y ago

I often say that the hardest program I ever write is "Hello, world". Once the program is running, I can modify it to make it do whatever I want. I now understand its rules and am in the domain of ordinary programming. But if a program doesn't even run, the set of things that is wrong is vast. And it's hard to Google, because the symptoms are usually something akin to "nothing happens". I can mess with things all day, many of which will make nothing happen differently.