Most new devs want to build things. Their motivation is driven by app ideas. It takes a while to develop a fascination for the internals of programming which c

Most new devs want to build things. Their motivation is driven by app ideas. It takes a while to develop a fascination for the internals of programming which comes after you start building things. The problem is that a normal person would look at the industry, look at what is the most popular, and think: this must be the way it should be done. But pick any point in programming history and you would then just be learning the latest fad. And you can only know how bad something is until you understand it completely in both theory and real-world experience. Only then are you adequately able to criticize it. So when the new hyped thing breaks through to adoption, its then at least 10 years until people can adequately point at the holes in it...and see which stick around and which get fixed. Yet every single new thing, people still convince themselves that this is the way of the future forever. I think an unbiased History of Programming Languages is probably the best thing people can learn. After learning a few modern languages of course. Then you can see why things are the way they are. It's funny to hear people criticize frontend for churn - which is true. But at least the language has stayed the same. Backend is actually incurring a lot more churn in not only the libraries and frameworks like in the frontend world, but the whole programming language too.