Leaving aside the whole gatekeeping tone of the article, because I see other's have covered it already, I do agree with you in the point that there are others, normally young, and inexperienced developers who tend to try to go for the shortcuts and yes, the JS community has done an incredible job to help there.
I say incredible because, for experienced developers, who already know those basic concepts, higher-level tools are heaven-sent. The problem is that those new developers need advice, need mentoring, and need good role models. Through mentoring, you can show them they're missing out on a lot of things. Through properly highlighting relevant information using the different mediums at our disposal, we can show them what they should be learning.
But we should never, at least in my opinion, blame a language (and I know you're not directly blaming JS here, but you're cutting it very close) for the shortcomings of a small group of its users.
Maybe what we're seeing here, playing the devil's advocate, is the start of a new trend. How long have we been coding using the same concepts? We might see some old trend become new again, such as with React, but we're not making any real advances (at the fundamental langauge level of course). What if this is an indication that we need a higher level platform to develop in? What if we need to stop coding like we're doing right now, and take follow the example of these "shortened attention-span" developers like you called them, and create something that lets them (and us) build software faster, quicker, and without having to worry about lower-level concepts as we do now?
What if this is an indication that we need a higher level platform to develop in?
Such has been called for hundreds of times since the genesis of programming. The ball always rolls a little ways, maybe produces a new language, only to discover that we can't get away from the fundamental concepts we're building on.
Read "Dreaming in Code" by Scott Rosenberg.
The "order of blame" is kinda easy to get flipped. Said group isn't apathetic because they use Javascript. They use Javascript (arguably improperly) because of their apathy.
Leaving aside the whole gatekeeping tone of the article, because I see other's have covered it already, I do agree with you in the point that there are others, normally young, and inexperienced developers who tend to try to go for the shortcuts and yes, the JS community has done an incredible job to help there.
I say incredible because, for experienced developers, who already know those basic concepts, higher-level tools are heaven-sent. The problem is that those new developers need advice, need mentoring, and need good role models. Through mentoring, you can show them they're missing out on a lot of things. Through properly highlighting relevant information using the different mediums at our disposal, we can show them what they should be learning.
But we should never, at least in my opinion, blame a language (and I know you're not directly blaming JS here, but you're cutting it very close) for the shortcomings of a small group of its users.
Maybe what we're seeing here, playing the devil's advocate, is the start of a new trend. How long have we been coding using the same concepts? We might see some old trend become new again, such as with React, but we're not making any real advances (at the fundamental langauge level of course). What if this is an indication that we need a higher level platform to develop in? What if we need to stop coding like we're doing right now, and take follow the example of these "shortened attention-span" developers like you called them, and create something that lets them (and us) build software faster, quicker, and without having to worry about lower-level concepts as we do now?
Such has been called for hundreds of times since the genesis of programming. The ball always rolls a little ways, maybe produces a new language, only to discover that we can't get away from the fundamental concepts we're building on.
Read "Dreaming in Code" by Scott Rosenberg.
The "order of blame" is kinda easy to get flipped. Said group isn't apathetic because they use Javascript. They use Javascript (arguably improperly) because of their apathy.
Interesting, I'll look it up. Thanks!