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how long does it take for react to make sense?

A friend of mine is a far better webdev than I could hope to be. She knows CSS inside and out, and seems to make it a point of pride to know every little detail. She did it in three years of focused effort, with no prior programming experience. It was one of the most amazing transformations I've seen, but it was only because she worked so hard.

She mentioned the other day that she's a bit sad she can't find any aspect of React she doesn't know. But now she's been banging her head against react native for the past few months, so there's no shortage of challenges. She's the primary architect of a startup's frontend webapp (and now their mobile app). I keep trying to push her to write and post her stuff, but she still feels like she doesn't know anything. But that feeling seems like the main reason she knows so much now, several years later.

To be fair, CSS is nothing like programming. So she wasn't really learning react, she was learning the entire paradigm of programming in the context of react. My guess is that would have been way harder than learning programming in a traditional language and then learning React, because you wouldn't have been able to separate the concepts that are React specific from the concepts that are just programming. It would have been harder to answer the "why do we do it this way" questions, which can be really important to developing an intuitive underatanding of programming.

I would like to add as well, as a career move, total slam dunk.

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