Difficulty is too many technologies available. So a beginner needs something/someone that teaches principles.

I have realized that simplier (boring) is better. E.g. simple html5 css combo is better instead of trying to navigate in JS frameworks.

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octantes an hour ago | parent | next [-]

There is something to this.

But I think at least in front-end engineering, the bigger question is what a new dev values.

LLMs make the browser itself easier to understand in depth, if that's something you want. Building in vanilla-everything, no deps, is now doable at speed and scale for beginners too.

Once you understand the web stack and the principles, you can migrate to any framework and understand their "magic" fast. I think that's not a bad learning path at all, if you use it well, and results in a more competent web-dev than the previous pre-LLM cycle produced.

But if the beginner values output aesthetics and speed more than building their mental model, it is possible to spend years building things without developing any understanding.

For me, at least, the more interesting question is how can we make beginners more interested in the former path than the latter.

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lolakutty 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>simple html5 css combo

HTML is not a programming language IMHO. Javascript running in browser is not very interesting either.

	▲	raddan an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		As a programming languages researcher I disagree. HTML is not just a programming language (a declarative one), it literally has the word “language” in the name. The world of programming languages is much larger than general purpose languages. Also, whether JavaScript is interesting is a matter of opinion. Given that for a long time it was the only web language, I’d say that makes it interesting. It’s also in my opinion a poorly designed language but that also makes it “interesting” because its behavior is sometimes hard to predict.
	▲	jaapz an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Javascript running in the browser is an amazing tool to learn programming as everything you need is right there in the program that's already installed anyway. No True Scotsmanning someone over that (especially someone who wants to learn something new) is a bit weird, IMHO
	▲	sixtyj an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Don’t catch me by word :) Would you prefer starting with compiling a program or running a python script? Imho for beginners it is too heavy, even a python that is so hyped recently.