Yeah, frontend dev is it's own beast. I've seen competent C++ devs at a complete loss when facing JavaScript. Especially if they've never done any asynchronous programming before.
I am not entirely sure what qualifies for being "competent C++ devs". My thinking goes that it is kinda hard to imagine competent developer in general (never mind C++) not having knowledge about async patterns.
I have done async in Clojure, Erlang (Elixir) and Rust but never touched Javascript (wat?). Not sure you can attribute async to frontend development. Erlang predates Javascript by almost 10 years.
Unlike Erlang/Go/certain Clojure libs, the JavaScript flavor of async is primarily around red-blue functions. A lot of stuff is explicit and not handled by the runtime. A single async keyword can easily taint the entire codebase.
More importantly, frontend is extremely demanding in terms of UI. While for e.g. QT, WxWidgets, native GUI toolkits, it is perfectly acceptable for things to look the same. On the modern web, every significant app is expected to have a "design language" and not look like each other. On the other hand, HTML by default isn't very stateful, sure it has some stateful components like checkboxes but in general you have to store the state in code. And every code base needs a custom UI. You end up with a state space explosion. That is also why frontend frameworks these days are trying to force things into finite state machines i.e. Redux, Elm architecture. Whatever term you prefer. Half of your UI codebase often have absolutely nothing to do with business logic and instead animations and user experience code to make things feel "slick". A ASP.NET WebForms just ain't going to cut it if you wanna build a SaaS. Sad because tons of money have been wasted on essentially marginal improvements on user experience, but good if you are the consumer of course.
> Not sure you can attribute async to frontend development.
Not trying to do that. But (unlike C++), you have to understand async to use JavaScript sensibly. If for whatever reason you haven't come across it another language, then you might struggle (esp. if you're coming from C or C++ where the skills required are very different).
