Should Junior Developers Still Learn JavaScript the Hard Way?

The article argues junior developers should still learn JavaScript the hard way, starting with vanilla JS and understanding what happens under the hood, even with AI copilots and frameworks doing most of the work today. Understanding closures, scope, hoisting, this, and the event loop gives a developer control, so they debug instead of guessing when something breaks in production. Frameworks turn over every few years, while the JavaScript underneath tends to stay stable.

The author blames the teaching method for making fundamentals feel pointless, pointing at endless for-loops and contrived examples, and recommends small real projects and breaking things on purpose instead. The path it recommends puts fundamentals first and frameworks second, using vanilla JS as the starting point before frameworks and abstractions enter.

Related: The Slow and Quiet Cognitive Atrophy of a Modern Software Engineer covers a nearby problem, the skill erosion that follows from no longer reviewing AI-generated code.

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• Defines “the hard way” as vanilla JavaScript, no frameworks at first, and understanding what happens under the hood, distinguishing it from watching tutorials at 1.5x speed, copy-pasting code until it works, or asking AI to “fix this” without reading the output.
• Notes that generating code faster than you can read it works fine until something breaks, at which point the question becomes whether you understand JavaScript or just the framework.
• Lists closures, scope and hoisting, this, the event loop, and async behavior beyond async/await as the concepts that turn debugging from guesswork into a diagnosable process.
• Argues frameworks turn over every few years while the JavaScript underneath stays stable, so skipping fundamentals means starting over with each new framework and leaning on Stack Overflow and AI for problems fundamentals would resolve directly.
• Locates the real failure in how fundamentals get taught, contrived loop exercises, rather than in the fundamentals themselves, and proposes small real-world projects and deliberately breaking things instead.
• Concludes that junior developers should learn core JavaScript concepts first and earn the frameworks and abstractions afterward, rejecting both permanent “vanilla JS only” and skipping straight to frameworks.