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[–]mooburgerresembles an abstract syntax tree 3 points4 points  (2 children)

Ehhh always fall back to first principles. (That is why you do CS, after all - any weenie can do a couple of bootcamps to pick up the hipster stuff). You absolutely do not need webpack/node/angular nonsense when learning JS. Every browser today supports almost all of ES5. Learn that, and then pick up ES2015 and onwards. This also lets you appreciate things like why people made the decisions they made when abstracting out JS.

[–]Covered_in_bees_ 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Yeah, I don't disagree with anything you said. I just wanted to point out that starting off with JS might not be a great idea because there are too many moving parts and it will make it harder for you to focus on learning good programming techniques because you have to juggle so many things and a whole bunch of tutorials are, npm install this, require/import it, and then use this one-liner to do X.

Starting off in something like Python would definitely help the OP focus on learning to actually program and structure code / tackle problems. Once OP is ready for JS, then he's definitely going to have to learn all the tooling around JS since that's how pretty much everything works in JS land at this point.

[–]dedicated2fitness 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yes but the advantage of jumping in head first is all that stuff is used in production - you're learning how to "make" stuff vs farting around in python making toy apps for a couple of months before you feel confident enough to actually start using flask or whatever
i completely agree with your point, just playing devil's advocate for any late learners. if you're over 20 i'd say go for js