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I presume the hatred comes from the purists looking down on the entire mess of web stack: PHP gets a bad rep, JavaScript is at the butt of every joke from an embedded C developer, and the front end of the stack is a total nightmare - CSS, w3c and all.

Web Dev is hard __precisely__ because of this mess!

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I think it's the fact that it's a mess that makes people who strive to write correct code and keep it all neat and tidy look down on webdev. It's sort of a variation of the "clean" vs. "messy" roommate conflict. Messy loses status in an industry that aspires to be "scientific." Not that it should be that way, just my take on similar observations.

You're definitely onto something here. "Messy" makes money. An obsession with "correctness" can kill a business, especially in its early stages.

Fail early and fail often. Web dev has very low (technical) overhead and aligns with "startup" mentality. The good news is that the customer has different expectations every 6 months so it's not the worst thing in the world to have a slightly different set of technologies to meet those needs.

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