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Comment by iammiles | Hacker News Reader

This is the same story for me. Moving from PHP to Python was really difficult conceptually for me. For years fiddling with Apache configs and uploading files via FTP was web development.

I sometimes find myself thinking about teenagers getting started nowadays and the accessibility of development, but I suppose there are a lot more resources now than the early 2000s for some enterprising kids to get started.

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Yes, but at the same time, web development was a much simpler process back then to get into and actually start to learn. No virtual machines to have to learn, or npm, or git, or... just code in php/html in notepad and maybe some raw basic javascript until js frameworks started becoming a thing and upload it via ftp. I mean, you didn't even have css to worry about...you just threw everything into a table! (lol!) There were only a few standard screen resolutions you had to worry about, and only desktops/laptops that were always oriented in the same position (landscape). I'm not saying it wasn't crude, but it was a lot faster to go from knowing 0 to building a dynamic web page with a real visitor counter vs everything extra you have to consider using modern devices and tooling.

I mean, the exact same things work now, a beginner don’t have to use docker, don’t have to care about responsive layouts, etc.

Similarly to how one can start writing python scripts without having to know OOP, maintainability, or even functions. It will suck, but it is a valuable learning step.

It is important to point out that this simplicity was by design. There was a ton of complex UI frameworks in the 90s, but Tim Berners Lee decided to get away with that complexity. Of course, developers being who they are, decided that simple is not what they wanted, and created probably one of the most complicated development stacks the world has ever seen on the top of the web browser.

Nearly 20 years ago I wrote a dynamic listing page in PHP that renders an html table from data in MySQL.

Today it still works.

Starting with PHP and Visual Basic got me on the way to making cool stuff really fast, but I think they both made the leap to "real" programing languages later. With web development, I didn't really move on from PHP's "HTML with extra stuff" until I came across Ruby on Rails, and I'm not sure I ever really got past VB for high level GUI desktop stuff, but I was able to get into some lower level C in high school, but I've never really done desktop GUI programming since other than a little bit of Cocoa/Objective-C with earlier version of Mac OS X.

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