The self-hating web developer

Understanding the Subject -- I think this better describes understanding the problem you're trying to solve. After that, solving it in any language, while not trivial, is still far easier.

A web developer wears many different hats. These days you have to be a real polymath to make really beautiful and functional websites. I never enjoyed the limiting belief that web development is some symphony of JS+HTML+CSS in the browser. It's more than that, and it is multi disciplined. Elements of WebPerf, Browser Engine quirks, progressive enhancement, A11Y, Design, UX, build scripts, templates, design patterns, server backend, frontend, bothend, mobile/handheld, analytics, rendering engines, etc

The list could go on for some length.

Not to mention the various principles borrowed from 'real' software engineering canon, like D.R.Y, K.I.S.S, etc.

In terms of proficiency and confidence, you should look up the Dunning–Kruger effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

And its ugly cousin:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome

I'm constantly impressed by people who have true, in-depth knowledge of any space.

If you're world class at HTML / CSS, know the specs intimately, know the differences and quirks in rendering engines and can explain why IE8 renders a selector differently -- that's impressive. That's also very valuable.

That wouldn't be considered real programming by a lot of folks. Who cares.

I've found that going broad is fun, going deep is hard. If you find yourself seeking challenges, there's often little need to branch out. If you dig deeper, you'll run into highly technical, hard problems really quickly. You also gain expertise few people have.

> The amount of stuff you have to learn all at once as a programming beginner is really overwhelming when you are just writing a simple local program, never mind adding all the complexity of networking and deployment and server config and the half dozen web techs.

You don't need to know more than HTML, CSS and PHP to "get started", and you can learn those one at a time, in that order - and once you know those 3 you can keep progressing, learning one thing at a time.

When I was younger and learning programming, I had an extremely hard time seeing what I could do with it. I was working with C and Python, which lends itself to simple command-line programs - but at the time I had no experience using command-line programs, so I had no idea what sort of thing I'd want them to do.

Things I had experience using, GUI programs and games, had a far higher barrier of entry and/or a much steeper learning curve. Now, I'd have a much easier time, I could separate the UI from the logic and write unit tests to have a sense of progression, but as a beginner, those things are out of reach.

The first really useful thing I wrote was an IRC bot in python, but even that was incredibly difficult. I had to work with sockets, threads, events, character sets... I don't even think I had a server to run it on, so I just ran it on my desktop machine that was on all the time anyway.

Compared to when I discovered PHP a few years later, it was immediately clear to me what I could do with it. I had experience using a lot of different websites, so there was a lot to draw inspiration from, and the barrier of entry was really low.

Rails may not scale well, but it's incredibly fast for pumping out CRUD apps. I've seen noobies in Rails move much faster than Node.js projects. Likewise I'm sure someone has seen the opposite.

I'm not here to tell you Rails is better than alternatives, but as programmers we need stop being so scathing in our opinions about other languages or frameworks.

Has it ever occurred to you that somebody may have started learning PHP, or Ruby/Rails, or Perl, or Java, simply because that was the only viable option available to them within the trajectories of their lives that would allow them to make a living? I know people learning Ruby who out of economic necessity had to switch to PHP to land a good paying job. This is particulary true in smaller cities where opportunities are far more scarce.

Switching to PHP is not a choice that I would personally want to make, but I do not judge or think less of programmers who end up doing this when they're first starting out because they have to.