Learn the fundamentals of JS first. If you have time, learn some libraries and Frameworks. Always remember that the fundamentals will stay the same, libraries and Frameworks fade. That said, long after something falls out of popular use there will be requirements for maintenance and adjustments. jQuery isn't dead yet.

It's the easiest way to use electricity, on and off. The CPU is basically a large array of transistors - electronic components (like a gate) that can be turned on and off by giving them power or not. You can imagine that a string of 0s and 1s can turn off multiple gates in any order you choose, and it's this massive puzzle of electron flow that eventually creates characters on the screen as I type them. Marvelous!

Learning yourself will make you a better problem solver. Researching answers as to why things don't work rather than being told exactly what do it. (Kids these days are lucky, sure I was 12 in 1994 when I started to learn, but I didn't use the internet until 2000!) Learning yourself may however direct you into bad practices and doing things the wrong way. Whilst there are often many ways to achieve success with code, some of them are technically incorrect. I've seen this a few times in my career. The absolute best way to learn is from people that are better than you - that is, become a junior developer in an agency that has multiple middleweight and senior developers. I did teach myself BASIC, I did go onto QBASIC during a subject that included programming at school (the teacher only knew RM BASIC, didn't have a clue what I was doing), I did formally learn (the basics of) C++ at university. I do have a degree. And it really bugs me when I see job adverts asking for developers to have a degree and experience - a few years experience alone is worth much more than a degree.

I feel this post is somewhat misguided. Any framework or bespoke code is only as good as the developer who made it, and installed it. Recommending somebody use Ruby rather than PHP because you dislike one CMS is a bit extreme. SFTP is completely fine. I doubt many if any are still using plain FTP. Most sites will be updated automatically with SVN or GIT though - no reason why updates to WordPress should be different from any other code base. It's important to remember that a fresh install is designed to be easy for beginners. A professional obviously has to make some changes, such as pretty URLs. The reason why this defaults to ids is because some hosts don't allow changes to Apache with .htaccess - enabling it by default can lead to server errors. It's completely normal for any Framework to have the basics and require plugins / components. Suggesting that this means WordPress alone is poor because of it is not constructive. Yes you should install caching and security plugins. Yes hiding file extensions and server architecture is a good thing - by hiding these things you make it less likely to be a target for hacking. A good WordPress blog doesn't look like a WordPress blog at all when you look at the source code. Having these things exposed by default is standard, not incomplete. I do want to remind everyone that web development is a professional career - if you're complaining about the tools not being good enough in their default state then who are you complaining to? Yes, WordPress is a good solution for blogs and simple CMSs. No, it's not brilliant at everything. In response to " learn how to write a proper website instead " I wholeheartedly agree - learn how to make a full, accessible, responsive, optimised, secure website. From scratch. No frameworks. Regardless of whether or not you use frameworks in your day to day development, being technically able to write the framework yourself will make you a much, much better developer.

Locomotive BASIC which I started to teach myself in 1994, when I was 12.

I would say it's more the understanding of web development amongst the community that's broken. Developers adding in multiple JS frameworks without caring about speed, optimisation, accessibility, or progressive enhancement, are the ones that need to stop. Immediately.

The explosion in JS frameworks over the past few years actually makes me feel a bit sad. I see more job adverts that require developers know all sorts of random skills (I saw one the other day that listed 42 separate skills). In spite of this, I see a great lack of websites that actually use any of this tech. The sites I have found using it have all been appalling in terms of optimisation, accessibility, and progressive enhancement, and I have to wonder if 'vanilla' developers are losing out to developers who use all of these new frameworks to produce more bloated, slower, less accessible sites for their clients.