I work as a django/python programmer by day, although I do my fair share of front-end work (mostly template building/cleaning and ajax/javascript/jquery.)<p>Although I've been programming for over half my life, I find that of all the things I do on a regular basis, it's doing DOM manipulation post-ajax call that forces me to do the most mental-judo.<p>Does anyone else find js work more difficult, relatively speaking, than typical server-side work?<p>(And yes, I use jquery.)
I've done both and front-end work is definitelly harder. If you do RIA with a lot of ajax updates, need to keep state and handle events, it becomes even more complex.<p>Historically, backend work has always been a piece of cake for me: receive data, persist it, return updated data, start over. This is way simpler.<p>I've yet to encounter a project where the inverse will be true. End-Users are so ingenious!
Javascript tends to be harder to debug. It's pretty rare that it takes me more than a few minutes to figure out why a sever-side error is occurring, even if it takes longer to fix the problem.
What about JS server-side programming? ;)<p>I imagine if you were a front-end JS programmer by day but doing your fair share of Python / Django then the JS would be a bit easier.
For me javascript is harder. Actually server-side is javascript too. Client-side js is harder because of browser issues, and the fact that client-side js I worry about more things like performance because the client can have a piece of shit pentium 4 workstation with ie6.