Ask HN: Why is web development so hard to learn?

...really depends on your background -- and, to some extent, who you work for.

but i do agree with you saying that web development has become hard. it has, indeed. we made it hard. i have seen beginners struggle with getting started, and i do struggle with it myself sometimes, even though i am no beginner.

the advantage that i, and experienced people, have over people just getting started is having witnessed the whole thing grow and change over time. it means it's easier for us to dismiss silly ideas because we have seen them over and over, and recognize good ideas. we became good at filtering the signal from the noise.

example: jsx (from reactjs) is a good idea. why? php has done before and it worked. it got many people into web development. now, some people rediscovered that embedding html in a programming language is not bad and applied it to modern javascript and modern web. for some of us it's deja vu.

i guess what i want to say is there's no need to despair. most people don't know the history of our field and continue to re-invent things over and over. i have recently been enjoying beginners tutorials much more than the so called experts talks. there are plenty of them on youtube. grab any of them and have fun!

I reject the premise. It's such a broad subject that I'm not sure there's any meaningful answer to your question, but of all the ways I'd describe it, "hard to learn" isn't on the list.

Most web development involves gluing together existing components. It's cut-and-paste programming until you have to scale things up. All the problems have been solved. When I'm working on a web application (which has been about half my career), I rarely feel challenged. Usually I'm writing the same application for the tenth time, just in a different language or framework. There are hundreds of web frameworks, and it can be frustrating having to learn a new set of tools and libraries every time flavor of the month changes, but that's not hard; it's just tedious.

The primary challenge for most web systems is scaling. There's a huge difference between being able to handle thousands of visitors a day vs millions. Very few sites ever need to scale to millions, though. And scaling is a problem for any system; it's not a challenge unique to web development, and not something you even need to think about if you're still learning the basics.

Is there something specific that you're struggling with? I'd suggest picking a framework (arbitrarily) and going through the tutorials out there. Something like Node/Express is pretty easy to get started with by following online tutorials.