I learned BASIC on an Atari 400 and loved it. It was as “back-end” as you could get for a 12-year-old. I obsessed over computers and programming, and hacking past floppy disk game security, and playing text adventures like Zork for most of the years from 12-14. I am so glad I had that experience to start with.
Later, when I returned to computers and coding (in college) I was still doing “back end” things creating applications for foreign language instruction. Eventually, I learned everything about the Web I could. But, as soon as I discovered HTML forms all I wanted to do was learn Perl and code stuff to process whatever I wanted to send to the “back end”.
All of that “back end” experience made me a kick-ass developer from a very young age.
Contrast that with all the hundreds of people who have been through SKILSTAK since 2013. Those who learned “front end development” sucked the most of all. They never really reached the stratosphere that others who preferred the “back end” (or even “deep end”) did.
And yet I’m watching yet another Twitch “Emeritus” instructor demonstrating what a “client” and “server” are for the first fucking time in his entire series. Way after filling people’s heads with shit about “front end”. It’s entirely ass backwards and I taught it much the same way thinking I was helping people because “JavaScript is so enabling and empowering.” It’s absolute horse shit and I see that very plainly now. I hate how full of confidence this person is even though he is driving all 230 people watching into a fucking wall. That’s the thing about web developers. The are so full of false hubris they don’t see what myopic, one-trick-ponies they have become.
Meanwhile, the world and industry is screaming for actual well-rounded developers and IT professionals. Not yet another “web dev” who may have coded some Python once upon a time.
Technologists who will truly excel above all others — even if they decide to do “front end” development — always master the computer itself before doing anything with “client and server” and that means learning everything but web development until the very end. The best first language you should learn is POSIX shell. And the next should be C. And the next Go. These languages completely dwarf any of the Web languages in overall applicability. God knows JavaScript is one of the worst languages on planet Earth, and yet so many think the entire world should run on nothing else, even a fucking documentation web site requires JavaScript these days. All because assholes who teach “bootcamps” keep fucking up everyone that thinks they are learning something of value.