How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

Learning in the dev world consists of aimlessly screwing around with an undocumented, unsupported, glitchy web/server stack for many many hours unpaid after you've already spent 40 hours that week putting bread on the table.

The whining has less to do with the "learning" and more to do with the yak-shaving part of it torturing us endlessly in the off-hours. And, unlike in medicine and law, there is precious little professionally-written, detailed, helpful literature to help us along the way. There's just "quick install" and then a command/api reference. That is... not up to the level at which medicine and law have their industry practices & standards documented.

jQuery had the DOM covered and is in fact now redundant itself and could be managed with a much, much lighter lib that spends a lot less time normalizing assuming you're dropping support for browsers even Microsoft no longer covers.

LESS and SASS were good for vars and should have stopped there. Standard browser support is finally in the works for that. But you certainly don't need both and for FFS you're just making an unmaintainable styling mess using all of the other features, especially (noob, please), nesting which needlessly adds to selector count like nobody's business.

We do NOT need to ASP/JSPify the DOM. Keeping content/structure code separated from the behavior code was the reason proper front end devs were running circles around Java/ASP.net devs. What the fucking fuck is the point of adding your own custom tags to HTML, which already had a perfectly serviceable approach to binding behavior to it? Or creating an XML-like syntax you mix/match directly with your JS?

Silicon valley noobs, please. I had lazy loading scrollable tables that could handle 50,000+ lines of data back when Google Docs was choking on 2,800. This shit is not hard. Stop wining and spend the time you apply to learning frameworks with next to no core technology understanding to actually learning the technology you have before you start adding pointless layers that solve nothing on top of what's already there and you'll be shocked at how not-hard it can really be.

Or let's not. Let's load a massive freaking ridiculous CSS and JS library by the Twitter devs, because, yes, surely they know through their work with a site that essentially boils down to a single text area, a great deal about handling complex layout and UI concerns.

AMD for a web app? Okay, I can see it, certainly for non-trivial SPAs , which NOT EVERY SITE NEEDS TO BE. But first, how complicated is this web app? If not-very, why were people struggling with linking scripts in the right order? Why did they need to link so many damn things to get the job done in the first place?

And FFS, it's just "data-binding." Calling it "Two-way" is redundant and makes you sound like a jackass who doesn't know what the fuck is actually happening. And it's just a pattern. And not a very hard one to implement.

MVC and MV? are great. Really, whatever the fuck keeps data separated from an app layer from your DOM-handling is fantastic. Frameworks that make it easy to follow such patterns in a way that all developers can become familiar with are great too. But sweet JavaScript Jesus why won't they just stop there?

We used to laugh at Java developers. What the fuck are we doing to ourselves? Why haven't I gotten an honest to god core web technology or native JavaScript question at an interview in like 3 years? We have indeed, ruined JavaScript.

Thanks a lot assholes.