Apex is salesforce’s programming language for everything you do in the back end.

It’s like a bare bones Java.

I’ve been working in salesforce for almost 10 years and apex still makes me question if I want to work in software every single day.

As I recall (this was almost 10 years ago now), Salesforce had tools to allow you to make your own websites and custom integrstions based on Salesforce data, but you had to use this web-IDE for Apex. Apex is like someone saw PHP and JSP and decided that the best thing to do would be to combine the worst elements of both. Both the markup and iterative code components were non-standard (at least with PHP you embed code into actual HTML), and the development process and environment were not documented to any useful degree, since almost no one used it. I vaguely recall that a major version change happened during my internship as well.