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Comment by throwaway713 | Hacker News Reader

> It is a genuine skillset and people should not expect to just be able to jump into something qithout knowledge training or experience and be proficient at it

Sure, but this also applies to understanding the U.S. tax code, which I think is a needlessly overcomplicated, poorly designed system that requires layers of inefficiencies to extract value from, much like web development.

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You can still make a webpage that is just pure, simple, structured HTML. In fact, the HTML5 standard arguably made it easier to write a simple HTML webpage.

The complexity in webdev exists for good reasons much (most?) of the time.

If you want interactivity, you need an actual programming language. If you're using an actual programming language, then there is a lot of tooling that can be used to make your life easier in the long run. Not intially, but definitely from a maintenance / bug-fixing / etc perspective. If you want to work on a large, complex project with a large team, this "complexity" is invaluable.

That being said, JS as a language kinda sucks still, but "complexity" has been added to attempt to ameliorate that too, such as with TypeScript / CoffeeScript / etc.

As I read the original post, Javascript the language isn’t the major problem. It’s things like configuration, certificates and (lack of) inter-operability of frameworks. I agree that this stuff is difficult in web development and I think it’s largely accidental complexity.

(That is, the web is a distributed system and distributed programming is hard, sure. But the configuration hell you often run into is separate from that.)

It's also a decentral system. Even for the points of interaction we have protocols that not everybody implements the same (often by mistake, sometimes by choice), but for internals of frameworks and tools, there's very little standardization even within one language, much less intra-language.

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