What does "Full-Stack" mean?

This is the second part in my series on full-stack fundamentals.

I tried to narrow down what "full-stack engineer" actually meant, and I discovered it was largely meaningless due to the fact that "stack" isn't really defined. part 1:

http://daemon.co.za/2014/04/introduction-fullstack-fundament...

Here's an outline of the rest of the series planned so far:

http://imgur.com/qsGqFFk

Feel free to ask any questions/make any suggestions here.

I will be following up with a curated set of references in the same format as this post:

http://wayfinder.co/pathways/53536427f7040a11002ae407/a-fiel...

I've also taken over http://reddit.com/r/fullstack to host discussions on this, and any other future topics I cover.

One answer is in the question: MEAN. Mongo, Express, Angular, Node.

A subset of A is the implementation of the presentation layer, which means you can do that, too — you can take a design and architect it into MEAN, which is one Tech Stack within the Full Stack range of options.

.NET developers, for instance, are "full-stack" by default if they're also building the UI. Python developers writing non-Web products are probably using GTK, and so are Full Stack by default.

Full Stack's meaning is more about the domain of interest, which is historically the Web. It doesn't really have meaning outside of Web Development. Looking at MEAN, we have a delineation of the Web Application Stack: DB, Server, Front end, Tooling. It just so happens that this is a Full Stack in implementable via JavaScript, most importantly: a Web language, the lingua franca of the Web. "Full Stack" is historically associated with JavaScript's maturity, but we can use this delineation of the Web Application implementation to retroactively make sense of non-JS "already existing" stacks that might correspond analogously.