Hey Nitzan, I am only going to touch on the subject of closures here. While I do agree with some of the things you wrote, I kind of disagree on closures. This is a fundamental JS concept and not some fancy new tech. You can sure start doing web development without having a solid grasp of the concept but that will eventually come and bite you in the a**s. At some point in your career you will have to learn about them so why not start with some strong JS foundations?
As a self taught developer closures really confused me when I started learning JS and the classic counter example you might stumble across certain books or articles didn’t really help. I think the biggest problem beginners face when someone tells them that they NEED to know about all these concepts is not explaining WHY and what are some practical applications for them.
Full stack developer & undergrad student of Mathematics; very passionate about both. Enthusiastic about learning, teaching, writing, open source, linguistics and more.
A fair point!
Foundations are super important, and especially web development - where so many technologies eventually boil down to abstractions over JS, HTML and CSS - it's critical to have a firm grasp of them.
I think the event loop in Node.js is another good example for this: you could get around without understanding it for a while, but eventually you'll come across a bug that you simply cannot figure out without it (and not knowing what's causing the bug would make fixing it much much more difficult!)
In retrospect, perhaps it was better if I'd explicitly said this somewhere in the post itself. On the other hand, the importance of foundations deserves a whole piece of its own, so I might just do that! 😂
As for your last point, you're completely correct, and I'd like to add that it also applies for some of the most popular tools out there - some of them are so popular that devs learn them (and, in turn, use them) without the understanding of why (and when) they are important. And typically they are important, but it's just as important to know why and when!
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Hey Nitzan, I am only going to touch on the subject of closures here. While I do agree with some of the things you wrote, I kind of disagree on closures. This is a fundamental JS concept and not some fancy new tech. You can sure start doing web development without having a solid grasp of the concept but that will eventually come and bite you in the a**s. At some point in your career you will have to learn about them so why not start with some strong JS foundations?
As a self taught developer closures really confused me when I started learning JS and the classic counter example you might stumble across certain books or articles didn’t really help. I think the biggest problem beginners face when someone tells them that they NEED to know about all these concepts is not explaining WHY and what are some practical applications for them.
A fair point!
Foundations are super important, and especially web development - where so many technologies eventually boil down to abstractions over JS, HTML and CSS - it's critical to have a firm grasp of them.
I think the event loop in Node.js is another good example for this: you could get around without understanding it for a while, but eventually you'll come across a bug that you simply cannot figure out without it (and not knowing what's causing the bug would make fixing it much much more difficult!)
In retrospect, perhaps it was better if I'd explicitly said this somewhere in the post itself. On the other hand, the importance of foundations deserves a whole piece of its own, so I might just do that! 😂
As for your last point, you're completely correct, and I'd like to add that it also applies for some of the most popular tools out there - some of them are so popular that devs learn them (and, in turn, use them) without the understanding of why (and when) they are important. And typically they are important, but it's just as important to know why and when!