Re: Required Skills (was EGL)

Walden H. Leverich wrote:

We're talking about HTML, Javascript and CSS, not ILE or RPG4. There's
nothing that you need your company's time or hardware to learn. If you
are not willing to invest in your own professional development on your
own time using your own PC then you're not worthy of being a modern
(employed) developer!

Okay. I guess we're at an interesting impasse of opinion. Personally, I find the Document Object Model to be a fairly complex beast, especially when you throw in the intricacies of cross-browser support. Try modifying a keystroke event, for example. Or capturing the F1 key. Tell me that's intuitive and easy to learn.

Personally, I don't think a programmer should have to learn how a browser works, any more than they should have to learn the DSM APIs.

Sorry, I don't mean to sound harsh, but them's the facts. We're not
talking about being experts in the inner working of Javascript object
prototyping, nor are we talking about understanding the intricacies of
custom class loaders in Java. I'm talking about knowing the basics of
Javascript, CSS and HTML. Roughly what a 13-year-old with a nice MySpace page would know.

And again, I disagree. I've seen what mySpace pages look like, and they look like crap. Creating an input field that only accepts numeric characters is not simple. Attaching a style to a specific cell in a table takes some forethought. Handling an onclick event and then stuffing a variable with a value is, while not rocket science, certainly not simple, especially if you haven't programmed a web page.

And it takes a lot of time to learn to do these things *correctly* - if you just start hacking away, you can get something done but it's likely to be unstable and hard to maintain. Anyway, we disagree.

To me, what made the 5250 interface so powerful was that programmers didn't have to learn how it worked; they used a tool (SDA) and a tightly integrated language (RPG) and could concentrate on the business logic instead of the user interface.

We've returned to that with JSF, in my opinion. Sure, there will always be situations where you eed to know the low-level stuff. And it never hurts to learn it. But at the same time, if you can create good looking, well performing pages without having to learn the DOM, then for many people, that's a benefit.

Joe