The way I think about salesforce as a developer is it’s essentially a big relational database with a bunch of CRUD guis for all the objects and a built in state

The way I think about salesforce as a developer is it’s essentially a big relational database with a bunch of CRUD guis for all the objects and a built in state machine thing which can model various business processes. Then there are bells and whistles such as reports etc built on top of that and a myriad of “partners”, providers, consultants etc who will sell you prepackaged or custom solutions to make salesforce do whatever you want/need it to do for your industry or business. In building that out it has its own somewhat idiosyncratic ecosystem of custom language(s) and technologies for creating the objects/workflows/relationships/reports etc and for doing the actual admin side, releasing new packages, doing upgrades and so on.