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Heard a senior dev at a meetup say beginners should only use vanilla JavaScript for their first 6 months, no frameworks at all
He said jQuery and React are crutches that stop you from actually learning the language, but I feel like modern web dev is just too complex to build anything useful without some kind of framework from day one - which side do you lean toward for someone just starting out?
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scott.mia1mo ago
Oh man, six months of pure vanilla? I'd probably give up and go back to flipping burgers by week two! My first "real" project was a to-do list app and I spent three days just trying to get local storage to work without breaking everything. But honestly, I do think it helps to at least spend a month or two messing with raw DOM manipulation and fetch requests before touching React. You'll appreciate the frameworks way more when you've felt the pain of rebuilding something from scratch every time.
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johnfoster1mo ago
Six months of pure vanilla JavaScript is the best thing a beginner can do. You learn how the browser actually works instead of hiding behind a layer of abstraction. When I first learned, I spent weeks fighting with event handling and async calls, and those lessons stuck with me forever. Frameworks change every few years, but understanding the core language never goes out of style.
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