Ask HN: For beginners: what is the hardest part while learning web dev?

It's crazy how fast the things move in js world.

Other than that, the need to learn five sets of semantics/syntax in parallel (HTML, CSS, JS, (Python|Perl|PHP), template language) with constant context switching was quite difficult as well. I lucked out in that the server-side tech I chose (Python & Zope) at least let me ignore SQL for a while, and I was able to minimize the amount of JS I used until jQuery came along to make front-end coding suck a lot less.

First of all, the tooling. Should I use NPM, Bower, Gulp, Grunt, Webpack or something else?

What text editor should I use? Visual Studio code? Sublime? Vim? Emacs? Something else?

What Javascript framework should I use? React? Angular.js? Angular2? Vue.js? Do everything with jQuery? Something else?

What CSS framework should I use? Bootstrap? Semantic UI? Material Design? Something else?

Should I just use ordinary CSS? SASS? LESS? Something else?

Should I use plain Javascript? Typescript? Dart? Something else?

All of the above have a learning curve (which means spending your valuable time learning the specifics of each choice). And no matter which combination you choose, somebody will come along and tell you that you have made all of the wrong decisions and should start again with X, Y and Z instead, which is incredibly frustrating when you just want to build something.

I've learned that, if you have learned X and are using it to build something, and somebody comes along and says, What are you using X for, everybody is using Y now, X is dead, you just need to have enough backbone to say, X works for me, I know it inside out and I can use it to build a mean product, go away.

It reminds me of the old but still relevant Joel Spolsky blog post, Fire and Motion[0].

[0] - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/

2. With languages like javascript, especially for those with no programming experience, it's really easy to get your feet wet and believe that you "get it", that you "know javascript". That's a fallacy. Javascript, perhaps more than other languages I know, is easy to stitch together to get working (quick and dirty) but really tricky to write eloquently in a way that follows core software development principles and in a way that is easy to manage in the long term (which is part of the reason that there are so many JS frameworks out there).

3. Accept that there are things that you just don't know (and things that you don't know you don't know) and dedicate time to learning from others; not just as you get started, but forever. We spend time on our team every day sharing even the smallest things that we've learned that week to promote this idea (even things like "I discovered the `git add -p` command and here's what it does!").