Re:Node.js and the new web front-end
by dasil003 on Monday October 07, 2013 @03:42PM
(#6510680)
There are also back-end specialists who cannot do what it takes to build an efficient back-end tool :)
The skills involved in web development and software engineering are so varied that I'd hesitate to define too few buckets to categorize people. Traditionally I think the reason designers get away with learning a bit of JS is because of the simple request, pageview and DOM semantic of the web makes it easy to hack on things until they work without the danger of really screwing things up too bad for 3 reasons: 1) you don't worry about persistence, 2) you don't worry about scalability, and 3) any problems you created only live as long as the pageview does.
Newer APIs like client-side storage and pushstate are allowing browser js to quickly evolve into the realm of serious software engineering with even a few twists of its own (like no easy production logs.) Of course a web designer can still come and do a tutorial and duct tape some things together, but this is equally true of PHP, rails or node. There is an inherent learning curve in learning how to operate at various levels of abstraction well enough to engineer a system that meets latency, scalability, correctness and maintainability requirements for a non-trivial app.
The skills involved in web development and software engineering are so varied that I'd hesitate to define too few buckets to categorize people. Traditionally I think the reason designers get away with learning a bit of JS is because of the simple request, pageview and DOM semantic of the web makes it easy to hack on things until they work without the danger of really screwing things up too bad for 3 reasons: 1) you don't worry about persistence, 2) you don't worry about scalability, and 3) any problems you created only live as long as the pageview does.
Newer APIs like client-side storage and pushstate are allowing browser js to quickly evolve into the realm of serious software engineering with even a few twists of its own (like no easy production logs.) Of course a web designer can still come and do a tutorial and duct tape some things together, but this is equally true of PHP, rails or node. There is an inherent learning curve in learning how to operate at various levels of abstraction well enough to engineer a system that meets latency, scalability, correctness and maintainability requirements for a non-trivial app.