Web Developers Are Disconnected | ThePrimeTime YouTube Video Summary
In this video, ThePrimeTime reads a blog post about his feelings on a growing disconnect between different generations of web developers. He describes the fundamental difference being that new devs are simply taught the new frameworks, while older devs actually know the inner-workings of PHP servers and how to start them and make requests. Ultimately, ThePrimeTime is more worried about the potential future AI use that will grow the gap even more.
Detailed Summary:
Web Developer Disconnects
ThePrimeTime begins by reading a blog post he wrote for 19 December 2024, entitiled: "How do you do, fellow web developers? A growing disconnect." The blog talks about how another developer was baffled that there are websites that don't use single page js applications (SPA). This is about the first paragraph, as thePrimeTime makes the following declaration.
"...This is why I started programming. which is that I see this new wave of people coming in, and I see myself, except for the only difference. I don't even want to call it JS brain rot, right? Like I don't even want to call it JS brain rot."
Computing Problems and New WebDev Products
When you are new to computing you will get thrown into a world, often of webdev. Webdev today, when compared to when thePrimeTime was a child, has many products that wrap so much of what actually happens under the hood. Back when ThePrimeTime started learning webdev, you would start a PHP server that had my squeel (LAMP stack) using XAMP. You would respond with HTML.
As things progressed the single page applications changed that. All of a sudden ThePrimeTime already had an entire model in his head of what's happening, how it's all actually like, how everything's working. Why routes act the specific way. How do you start a server? and how you actually do all these things. Then as it got into single page applications, that model was already well formed, ready to use. So while everyone else has a massive context switch, he doesn't.
Current View
However, todays kiddos, all they get is NextJS or some giant framework, even Laravel. The thing is that the fundamentals are skipped when you use any of these frameworks. ThePrimeTime genuinely feels bad about this too. How do you understand the world if you start in NextJS land? He feels like you need to back track so much more information that its almost like you create a very distorted view.
Drawing Comparisons
To further demonstrate thePrimeTime draws a simple PHP->HTML request and response diagram to show new programmers, they will need to work their way backwards to have a proper fundamental understand that programmers of the past take for granted. Then, ThePrimeTime mentions Javascript and C++. Assembly is the equivalent to the people starting straight from NextJS.
So all the fundamentals will be massively skipped whenever you use any of these frameworks. He feels genuinely bad about this. He ends his presentation on the topic by showing the original snippet that sparked this entire conversation.