Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming

Jeff is completely out to lunch here.

"All Programming is Web Programming" only where "All Programming" is short-hand for "all programming that Jeff Atwood comes in direct contact with," and even then it's not really true.

Does he really think that the hospitals and banks and oil companies, etc., are run largely off web apps?

It's clearly nonsense, and part of me is beginning to suspect that this "Jeff Atwood" persona is just an excuse to troll...

I remember the stacks of documentation I used to lug along from house to house (or office to office), and I wonder how the 'real' programmers today would get by without the web. Google and many other websites make for a greatly reduced effort in finding relevant information. The web has fostered communities of 'true' hackers all over the globe, working on niches so obscure that 20 years ago you'd have never met someone that even understood what it was that you were trying to achieve. It's the democratization of hacking, the barrier to entry has been lowered.

And understandably that has some folks pining for old times.

Sure, some web programming is not as exciting as finding a really elegant solution to some problem with a two page algorithm that will have everybody think ('why didn't I come up with that?').

But on that level almost all of us became 'application programmers' long ago.

The toolbox is now so filled with great instruments that we can go and make some music. There is real programming to be found on all levels of the game, more on some than on others but still. And the tools are so easy to use that plenty of people that would never dream of a programming career a decade ago are getting in on the game, and they find that they can do useful stuff.

The 'real' hackers of today build the tools that the rest of us use, and I don't think it was ever any different, just some illusion. Mostly due to the fact that you used to be able to understand everything about some branch of computing.

The big issue here is that the 'browser' really is an intelligent terminal and that sooner or later you'll see the analogue between the way we work today and the way we worked in the early 70's to 80's, before the advent of the PC.

The PC revolution is slowly being reversed by the web, more and more data is migrating 'online', more and more code is server side. The only thing that works against that trend is 'ajax', where some code migrates the other way.

So, hacking is far from dead, web programmers are 'real' programmers, there is a lot of work to do and if you want to hack to your hearts content without feeling frustrated by all the layers I have a stack of 68000 manuals here that are looking for a new home. Then you can unplug your internet connection and pretend the revolution never happened.

Programming will never be 'just web programming' or any other form of it, software is so pervasive it is scary. If you are on the frontiers of computer vision, AI research or some other field that seems to have no impact on the web today then I'm sure that your technology + the web some day in the future will be a more powerful combination than without.

Technology is a means to an end. To some it is a means unto itself but that's a small minority.

good point. But say you have a photoshop webapp (with all the features the desktop version has). When you want to apply several filters, you are depending on the capabilities of the server and also on the current stressload of the servers. Things might take a long time to complete or cost too much.

With a desktop app, you're in control of your own machine.

Search this site, someone posted an anti-atwood greasemonkey script that removes the semi-random bolding.

1) is totally against best practice

2) Web hosted applications will be more reliable than anything you have at home, simply because it will be easy enough to use your home machine as a cache. The only good reasons to keep data off the net will sooner or later be transfer speeds (instant access) and privacy concerns. We're not there yet in this respect (witness the recent GAE outage) but we're moving in the right direction.

3) Constant internet connectivity is not 100% commonplace, but in a short while (less than a decade) an internet outage will have similar impact as a regular power outage.

4) On the contrary, web apps are almost always already more powerful than a desktop application. Webapps build on the power of the resources embodied in the web, those resources are vast, MUCH larger than anything you or I will ever have on our desktop.