As a 35 year old developer who was using CSS and Javascript in the pre-jQuery days, this really strikes a chord with me. Things like Meteor and Angular and Bootstrap BLOW MY MIND. I understand this is the way of technology but truly we live in a gilded age of app development. Sometimes it's nice to take a retrospective and think about how awesome things really are.
I'm gonna pretend you're just bad with word choice and were sincere with your post...
While it's good to maintain a positive attitude and congratulate ourselves on the progress we've made, it's unwise to call ourselves "awesome." We're anything but.
Web development is still way harder than it should be. Javascript is still much worse than it could be. Node.js is still a bad plan. Software is very much in its infancy. We're still 10-25 years behind the state of the art in the industry, and many people get defensive if you point it out because their egos are tightly coupled with their work work methodology.
It's not hopeless, but it's nowhere near done. And hyper-nested callbacks are a primitive that we should grow beyond, and numerous methods to do so are not only possible, but already researched and proven before you and I were born.
This "we're anything but" mindset is self-perpetuating. 10-25 years from now the next generation of programmers will be saying the same thing. Before 1995 the concept of spending a weekend, making a reasonably functional web app and having the entire planet access it at a moment's notice simply was not feasible to even entertain mentally to anyone except those in academic and military circles who already had access to the Internet, and even then the "reasonably functional in a weekend" was not part of that equation.
If we stop focusing on what's "wrong" and take a moment to see how incredible people's reach and speed-to-market is compared to even 10-15 years ago, we might actually take a moment to stop talking about how terrible everything is and marvel at just how far we've come.
Glass half-full is what I'm trying to accomplish here.
> This "we're anything but" mindset is self-perpetuating. 10-25 years from now the next generation of programmers will be saying the same thing.
Depends. If they're still 20 years behind academia, they deserve to be saying it. If they still have this weird culture that abhors modern advances in favor of "getting shit done" and wastes time arguing what kind of text editor matters, they deserve to say that.
> Glass half-full is what I'm trying to accomplish here.
I like to say that the glass has 118.29 cubic centimeters of water in it.
> truly we live in a gilded age of app development
Are you intentionally referring to a superficial positive veneer hiding serious, fundamental, and widespread problems [1] or are you meaning to refer to a "golden age" [2] instead of a "gilded" one?
I believe "gilded" is spot on here, because that's what the state of the art Web essentially is: sleek designs rendered by stacks of software/technologies "hiding serious, fundamental, and widespread problems" (browsers).
I think you're probably about 5 years too young (maybe that's where OP is coming from). You started in the Dark Ages but didn't experience the Classical times before them of desktop and client/server apps.
There are a lot of advantages to web development, but in terms of tools really helping you to whip up something that meets the standards of the day, we still haven't caught up to those times. Meteor is the only framework I've used that I'd say is as painless as Delphi and its like were at the time.
