"Backend" is absolutely not a simpler problem to solve, it's an umbrella term encompassing a wide variety of domains. If you're talking specifically about Web backends, then sure, maybe there's a case to be made there.
Which is why it puzzles me that the "frontend devs are not real programmers" meme still exists. Like if it is so easy, then why can't backend devs do it themselves?
Complex tasks are different from complex tools.
Re:A modest critique of Htmx
by backbeginning on Wednesday October 09, 2024 @02:01PM
(#41790841)
We can, management just insists on hiring JS kids to do it a thousands times more complicated. "Just use a sane PHP framework" will get you fired now. Alas.
The problem is thinking that all of these things are different domains when they really aren't. The web browser is just a program; its job is to fetch resources and render HTML. If you know how HTTP and HTML/CSS work, you can absolutely make great web applications.
But this requires knowledge and expertise, and also maybe not shoehorning an entire application framework into what was designed to be a collection of hyperlinked documents. I suspect this has more to do with money than anything else... the web is dead, long live the web.
I feel like the backend is just an inherently simpler problem to solve, request in, response out. Largely stateless. Of course there are harder things to do like stateful 2-way connections, but the solutions are mostly concentrated on a couple of technologies. Like yeah we have stuff like graphql, but at the end of the day the principle is the same.