Been doing application development, primarily backend development, for a number of years. I've always found it quite easy to move up and down the stack and work anywhere from UI down to the bare metal in a number of environments and languages, and always the 'fast learner' who quickly knows the system inside-out, even when thrown into some area that I've never seen. Lately I've been doing some web development on a fairly long-lived and large code-base, but I'm finding it MUCH harder to wrap my head around than application development ever was. I think my difficulty is that the whole environment feels so... HACKISH... everything is a horrible hack on top of a horrible hack. (yes, I'm familiar with the history, been using the Internet since before the web) I'm not even talking about the fact that everything has to be stateless, in fact I develop desktop apps as stateless even driven UIs as well, but just the fact that it really feels like there's no consistent way to do anything, there are 1000 different frameworks, all with their own way of doing the most basic tasks, and my experience is that they all ... well... suck. Am I missing something? Is it me resisting change? Is web programming really that bad? Is it really just that I need a new mental paradigm? Can you recommend any good resources to help me orient my mind to this new way of thinking?