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Comment by choeger | Hacker News Reader

> you don’t expect the dentist to cure your heart and neurosurgeon to fix your hemorrhoids.

That's your problem right there. Your frontend is not as different from your backend as dentristy is from neurosurgery. If you think it is, you might lack some understanding of how things work.

Tbh., whenever someone hails the specialization and how their particular field is so special, I hear them saying "I really do not want to be bothered with all these nasty details". And that's fine. But it's not something to be proud of. Personally, I would love to have a better understanding of how user interfaces or database work internally. I think the understanding would only make me better.

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> That's your problem right there. Your frontend is not as different from your backend as dentristy is from neurosurgery.

I'm not a neurosurgeon, or a dentist, but this doesn't strike me as true. Front-end dev uses totally different tools and languages, and a different set of design principles, than back-end dev. It didn't use to be this way, but it definitely is now. There's almost no cross-over in skills now, especially with Elm-derived front-end frameworks taking over.

> totally different tools and languages

do they, though? What's distinguishing JavaScript from, say, a poorly implemented lisp? What's the main difference between typescript and a poorly implemented ML? Syntax? Come on! There are maybe a handful of really different programming languages designs. And only three of them are really widespread.

> There's almost no cross-over in skills now, especially with Elm-derived front-end frameworks taking over.

If you are talking about Elm the language then it is very clearly influenced by Haskell. It is literally rooted in FRP. So to understand elm you need to know something about functional programming and type systems. Then you read the docs and you are in the game after a few days.

yeah, I bet if you talked to the average front-end dev and told them they spend all their time writing poorly-implemented lisp, they've have a few choice words to say about it ;)

From the CS point of view, sure, there are only a half-dozen languages. From the IT point of view, having a few years of experience dealing with the exact details of the "poor implementation of lisp" makes a massive difference in productivity and effectiveness.

There are also widely separate concerns between front-end and back-end. UI patterns is a whole discipline in itself. Deployment and CI, AWS vs DO, not to mention containers and swarms, is just a subset of one aspect of "dev ops" these days. There's also the entire subject of database design, of securing HTTP/S/2 traffic, data encryption schemes, logging strategies. It's endless, on both sides. And none of the skills are transferable. Knowing AWS doesn't help you implement a UI, and knowing React does nothing to help you design a database.

I dare you to try implementing a complex UI in React after learning FP, reading the docs and a "few days" ;)

But to get back to the analogy... I can easily see a neurosurgeon saying "teeth, they're just specialised bones! Give me a few days to brush up on the basics, and I'll have that wisdom tooth out in a jiffy" in the same manner.

Front- and back-end are very different things. I’ve worked with some brilliant engineers who couldn’t make a serviceable UI to save their lives, never mind the intricacies of overall user experience.

I’ll balk at UI/UX people who can’t code, but I’ll stand by the value they can add to a project.

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