https://rakhim.exotext.com/web-developers-a-growing-disconnect

- Rakhims blog

How do you do, fellow web developers? A growing disconnect.

19 December 2024

I had a "woah" moment once when one programmer got genuinely baffled
about the fact that a website somehow "erases" the history of
requests from the Network tab of Chrome DevTools. He was wondering
what magic method was used to hide the communication. He hadn't
realized the app was not a single-page JS application (SPA), and he
actually wasn't aware there is another way to make web apps. The idea
that each click actually makes the browser fetch a completely new
page, without any JS involved, was alien to him.

I feel a growing disconnect between my notion of programming and the
younger web developers' notion of it. I promise, this isn't a
get-off-my-lawn post.

I'm not that old (right?..), 36 as of today, and have been
programming since 11. My first lines of code were written on a 80286
16-bit machine (there weren't too many modern computers in our small
town at the time). So, there are full-time developers today who had
started their journeys after I had a few years of dabbling in code.
There are young devs who were born when I was 18 and had a few
part-time jobs done.

There's been a lot of talk about modern programmers not knowing how
fast computers are (Do you know how much your computer can do in a
second?, Jon Blow's rant, Casey Muratori: How fast should an
unoptimized terminal run?). There are so many levels of rich
abstractions on top of hardware and even the OS kernel, one can make
some arguments to justify the obliviousness of someone who needs to
develop a product feature in some web shop. I'm not talking about
this today, but I do want to talk about abstraction levels. My
growing feeling of disconnect gets fueled mostly by seemingly
shifting notions. Some examples I've heard are people saying "vanilla
JS" when talking about Node, or saying "JS without frameworks" when
talking about React. The "woah" moment from the first paragraph is
another example.

Today I watched the pilot episode of Leet Heat, a game show for
developers. It's cool! I enjoyed watching it, but at the same time it
refueled this feeling of disconnect. First, it's meant for developers
, not just web developers. But the categories are:

  * Web standards
  * Typescript
  * Frameworks
  * Databases
  * Computer Science

You can guess that Frameworks is only about front-end web frameworks
like React and Vue, and databases is about some unspecified SQL
format and also Mongo. And then there's Computer Science. One of the
questions there was:

    What's the main difference between Array.map() and Array.foreach
    ()
    a) Map returns a new array, foreach doesn't
    b) Foreach is faster than map
    c) Map only works with numeric values
    d) There is no difference

This feels like a very JavaScript question... Sure, map is a generic
kind of operation, but foreach and the kinds of answers are just
assuming JS.

Another question in Computer Science was "What's the output of this
code?":

const p = new Promise(
    (resolve, reject): void => {
        resolve(1);
        resolve(2);
        reject(3);
    }
);

p.then(console.log).catch(console.log);

But how is this computer science? Perhaps this is an example of
shifting notions I was talking about. "Pure JS", as well as abstract
logic of resolution of non-trivial promises in TypeScript is such a
niche, low-level concept, that it's treated as the science of
computation.

The question is presented on the screen in form of a screenshot from
JetBrains IDE:

[blyg4YG5F6]

Notice the hints in grey boxes: they are not part of the code, but a
feature of the IDE. So we aren't even looking at code, we're looking
at its enhanced representation.

One can argue that any programming is computer science, and yes,
sure, but by this logic the topic shouldn't even be among the
categories. Web standards is also computer science. It's a game show
for [DEL:web-developers:DEL] [DEL:developers:DEL] computer
scientists.

Another Computer Science question was:

    Which method removes and returns the last element of an array?

I mean, sure, this is a fun game show where people eat spicy food for
entertainment. It's probably not representative of job interviews or
the way people think about programming. But I don't know, maybe it
is? Again, I'm not bashing them for making it, nor am I trying to be
the "um, ackchyually" guy. These are anthropological observation if
you will.

I've always felt safety in coding. It was a comfortably logical,
deterministic, and beautifully consistent refuge from the world of
vague and ambagious reality. I also felt certain kinship to other
programmers, it was my tribe. So I'm worried about this feeling of
disconnect, a little bit. I don't want to become an old man yelling
at cloud. What worries me even more is that when I see a similar
sentiment in comments (HN, Reddit, etc.) and blogs, very often it
goes way overboard, and I feel a disconnect toward that side, too.
Someone would grumpily bash "stupid JS frameworks" and "bootcamp
devs", while religiously proclaiming how everybody should just use
bash and vim, or something.

It's all pretty fascinating.

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