Is there a high-level language for the web?
"Links is a new programming language designed to make web programming easier. . . Links eases the impedance mismatch problem by providing a single language for all three tiers. The system generates code for each tier; for instance, translating some code into Javascript for the browser, some into a bytecode for the server, and some into SQL for the database."
At first I wasn't going to post this, since it's a research project, not a production system; but all these answers saying "that's how it is, deal with it" begged for a counterexample.
Web programming is an inherently multi-discipline craft.
The primary reason for this is because of seperation of concerns...the reason that HTML and CSS and JavaScript, SQL, etc, are not mashed together in one language is because they each have seperate goals, caveats, pitfalls, and strengths.
Can you imagine trying to debug a site that has SQL, CSS, JavaScript and PHP code mixed together in the same source files? You may have already had the misfortune of doing so. Sadly, there are literally thousands of sites written like this, and it is a complete nightmare trying to debug or add to such messy amalgamations of presentation, data, and structure.
All in all, an utter mess! How is one supposed to teach web development to kids?
I think the most important thing is teaching the fundamentals of programming and making them stick. Variables, logic, pointers, memory management, algorithms, data structures, etc.
When you have the fundamentals of programming, it's easy to work in multipe languages, pick up new ones, and easy to change with the times. This is an invaluable skill for something as constantly-evolving and trend-based as web programming.
In my opinion people new to programming should be started at lower level languages, like C for example. People should be tought the intrinsic, fundamental concepts of programming and should gain knowledge of what is going on behind the scenes before even being shown a higher level language like PHP or Python.
I think that this attitude towards teaching programming will have the effect of breeding better web developers as well as providing a barrier of entry that will weed out people that don't have the interest or intelligence. I think the result of this type of attitude will be better developers, better software, and ultimately more powerful languages and tools.