teddybloake

I'll make a similar comparison. Let us take technology out it:

I make a board game and give away instructions on how to play the game. The game instructions include going out and buying Lego pieces to assemble the boardgame. Lego now wants to make boardgames and sues me. Is what I'm doing illegal?

This is really skewed to recent or new graduate and elite universities. When I was out of college, 15 years ago, some of the internships listed were hard or near impossible to get into. Take for example Goldman Sachs. They should be listing more regular internships and not those who managed to matriculate into the elite of the elite (hint: not a meritocracy). If anything it creates disillusionment that STEM careers are a straight path to being the next Bezos. It is like golfing: pick up golf to play golf not to play on the PGA tour.

This is not a great way to teach anything. I would say that if you're going to go this route it would probably be more beneficial to learn AWS/GCP/Azure cloud services. The subtext I got was that this was a vocational type program anyway and getting those certs will go a long way in corporate environments versus knowing how those services run.

I digress, learning CGI might be useful in a historical context but as others pointed out its pitfalls are large and there's a reason we don't use it anymore. If you've ever seen a mess of a perl and bash to try to serialize some JSON you'll know why. It encourages bad behavior that doesn't scale well.

If your students aren't understanding template generation and mapping routes to functions they probably lack a background in a lot of fundamentals. At best they'll simply copy and paste best practices without understanding why. I think taking a step back and looking at interops, FFI and APIs will explain why web servers and the web itself became popular. To understand that you begin to need to now the basics of operating systems and by default compilation and some other undergrad theories. These aren't taught just for fun.

That said modern web frameworks hide a lot and that's not necessarily a bad thing. In attempt to make things isomorphic and routing client-side the delineation between client and server is blurred. Even I had a had hard time figuring out whether things were rendered on the browser or the client-side and WASM blurs this further.

The weird late 90s derail into "just use Windows" is a huge red herring too. I use OS X, and I've used Windows. I spend most my day in a terminal or a Linux VM and still won't have Linux as my primary desktop. On the same hand if you've ever had to do something low-level on Windows or a Mac it is painful. See Linux's cpufreq vs whatever Windows or Mac has to deal with big-little CPU architectures. The trade off is that the desktop experience is brittle at best. That's okay there's a hundred of ways to develop for Linux on Windows and Mac, that's a solved problem.

I'm seeing a lot of React jockeys come out of bootcamps like these with a cursory understanding of computing. Similarly I see people come out of top colleges thinking they'll be perfecting algorithms in Rust. Neither is right, but the React jockeys are dangerous as they have a "works on my machine" mentality that a lot of us learned the hard way doesn't work. Now it seems you can sort of throw cloud resources to make it go away. I'm not saying everyone needs a CS but a fundamental understanding of what you don't know can go a long way.