You have just answered why I've never been able to cut bread straight. I always thought I was just bad at it and somehow everyone else had mastered bread cutting while I wasn't paying attention.
What an odd rebuttal. "This field isn't sexist, it's just so toxic towards women that none of them want to be a part of it."
The gender gap isn't inherent, both India and China have a nearly equal percentage of men and women in computer science. The gap seems to be a mostly western phenomenon.
I would also vouch for this approach, it's what I did and it helped force me to understand instead of just copying. Honestly, working through this book was the most fun I've had programming in years.
It also helps to have a practical application that you're working towards - I was in the process of building a game server in Node and wanted a way to modify the state at runtime, so I used this book to build an embedded language for debug builds.
Maybe this is a hot take, but it seems like browsers have essentially become what the operating system should have been, and it's the reason that everyone crams things into web apps / Electron instead of building native applications.
Browsers have a set of APIs that are decided on by a standards committee, and you have to implement those standards if you want your browser to be compliant. As an application developer, all I need to do is check a page to see how widely a standard has been adopted and then use it - I can be sure that my code can ship to (nearly) every device and behave uniformly, with minimal tweaking.
If the operating system had gone that route, we wouldn't have had to build more layers on top of it to abstract away the differences.
I was doing some pair programming with a colleague not too long ago, and after several minutes he was said something to the effect of "Could you close that [expletive] dialogue?" that had popped up to tell me that VS Code couldn't deal with some file extension or other. It had apparently been there the entire time.
I hadn't even noticed it (at least not consciously). I've apparently been trained somewhere to ignore dialogues, and I would hazard a guess that it has something to do with the prevalence of hostile UX patterns.
