This really speaks to my heart. I learned programming as a young kid when my uncle taught my pascal. But I just couldn't see the point of console programs and n

This really speaks to my heart. I learned programming as a young kid when my uncle taught my pascal. But I just couldn't see the point of console programs and never really got into it. Eventually I picked up late 90s HTML (hello geocities!) and php was a natural next step. I still remember going to the library to borrow the book PHP and MySQL web development. It was so empowering. I could make any kind of application I wanted and see the result in my browser, GUI and all (Win32 API was way beyond me at that age). I made my own forums, ebay clone, and a few web apps for an old Korean MMO. Fast forward a few decades, and things look very different. Tons of web app backends being written in go, nodeJS/TS, and I recently learned people write them in rust+webasm. It's just crazy to me. I've worked on FOSS projects that are massively over-complicated because of their platform/language choice, when they would've been very straightforward php choices. But php still has this weird stigma about it despite most of the old concerns having been addressed. I do have to say, though, that front end web development is way better than before with the advent of React and co, webpack, css libraries etc. Doing all that html/js/css by hand was always painful.