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Discussion on: Are newer developers pushed too exclusively towards web development?

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Peyton McGinnis

How exactly? I'm not saying your wrong, I'm just curious as to how you arrived at your conjecture that learning web development is linear compared to other fields.

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Wiktor Wiśniewski

Because when you want to do something basic you just need to reach for basic information/knowledge/documentation which is always somewhere right there.

well obviously if you want to write a Hello World in C++ you also have to reach for basic info...

Yeah, right but the amount of work you have to do is a lot different. The thing is JavaScript is a scripting language. My first approach to programming ever was C++ and I failed. When I was 17 I wanted to write a game bot in AutoHotkey (I guess?) which is also scripting language. It was a game-changer, suddenly everything was easy to do. So yeah, I think if you never coded before then scripting language is a good starting point. When we add the number of resources available on the internet it turns out JS HTML and CSS are the best choices IMHO.

dude comparing C++ to JS as an argument to learning curve... Have you ever heard of python before? java maybe?

Sure, I work in Java on a daily basis and I can tell that it's way more complex than JS. I'm not an expert in a Python but the syntax looks webdev friendly.

The good thing about web development is that to make a simple functional interface all you need is actually few lines of code and a browser. And probably notepad. No compilers, no IDEs, nothing. Go on and try to make a GUI in Java or Python or whatever without setting up environment, downloading packages etc :P

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Wiktor Wiśniewski • Edited

Before I get hit by argument such as:

but you know world doesn't end on making GUI?

Sure, but I think this is what newbies want to do - make something more interactive than terminal if-else game :)

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Peyton McGinnis • Edited

I mostly agreed with you up until your last point. Of course it's a bit more difficult to write a GUI in Java or Python, because JavaScript is designed for building user interfaces.

In the same way, I could say, "try building an efficient machine learning algorithm in JavaScript instead of Python", because Python is designed for data science.

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Wiktor Wiśniewski

You are right, I knew my example wasn't the best! We are talking about learning curve here and I believe that doing anything in a scripting language is easier than in high-level language if you are a beginner and you don't have special requirements.

Python is probably an exception - I don't know, I don't have much experience with python. I tried to learn it but I'm not into data science and all I wanted to do was possible with node.js :P.

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Peyton McGinnis • Edited

Ok, I gotcha, and with that I'd mostly agree.

And same! I've never had to touch Python much, I pretty much use Vue + MongoDB for everything nowadays. 😂