There will always be a place for both. Move on...
Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming
21–30 of 102 posts
Re: Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming
#22Previous to this, was all programming Windows programming because most people used windows?
The web server is an interface. Making a good interface is part of programming but it isn't the only part, not by a long shot.
Re: Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming
#23Web programming, shweb programming. You have a client and a server and a way to communicate. JSON is a great way to communicate between client and server. But does it matter if the client is Java or JavaScript or a browser plugin? No. And the server side? It's what ever you want.
Re: Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming
#24I think I subconsciously had the same opinion as Michael, but reading it out loud makes you consider how dumb the idea really is. Do I think python developers are stupid just because it's easier to program in than C? No of course not. Elitism is rarely justified based on the tools or platforms people use.
I think that both remarkably miss the point that the true measure of software is actualized value to the end user. Who cares about platform or depth of technical knowledge? If some PHP hobbyist who knows nothing about mmap(3) delivers a site that works for people then he is a successful programmer. But assertions like "You hope everything doesn't "move to the web"? Wake the hell up! It's already happened!" irk me. Th…
I dunno, Jeff specifically says "I want people to use my software." If there was no value, people wouldn't use it.
Re: Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming
#25I enjoy actually Atwood's writing sometimes, but why does he have to randomly put some of his sentences in boldface?
Because we're all afflicted with terrible ADD after years of internet usage. We need short paragraphs with key sentences bolded and big colorful images in-between to keep our attention.
Re: Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming
#26Jeff 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" person…
I worked on a contract for Petronas in Malaysia (Retail Oil Division). We built a pay at pump system, with a centralized processing server to the different major cc providers (Am Ex, Visa, Mastercard).
The server was built using Java on a BEA Weblogic App server with Oracle Backend. Each station had a mini station controller (To manage the different pumps and manage the queue and messaging to the central server). This was built with Tomcat & SQL Lite.
While not connected to the internet, the system was almost entirely built with web programming and hardware hacking.
Re: Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming
#27[deleted]
Re: Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming
#28Even for Adwood standards this article is really incoherent. It's also a bit of a troll.
The original claim (that web developers do web development because they're too dumb to do real programming) is of course silly. However, building web apps is to a large extend about memorizing quirks, testing code in a dozen different browsers and dealing with broken libraries and lousy debuggers. Maybe 2% of the time you deal with interesting problems, the other 98% of the time you're dealing with mundane problems. Not exactly intellectually challenging.
I think that to a large extend web applications are all about interface, and interface programming is almost inherently mundane. After you've worked out how everything is supposed to work on a whiteboard the rest is "just the implementation". If you're working on desktop applications, it's very different, because the interface is mostly composed of standard controls. Back in the 80ies every console application designed its own ascii interface. Arrow key navigation? Let's build that from scratch! Essentially, web development is in the same stage. Most of the JS code is mundane boilerplate. jQuery/prototype is a leap in the right direction, but we're still in the middle ages here.
On the desktop it's different. MS Paint? Algorithms, and lots of them! Memory management. Flicker free drawing. Bézier-approximations for line drawings. MS-paint, which is a relatively trivial desktop app, has more interesting problems than blog engines, CMS engines, hackernews (the app), photo sharing sites and so on.
Other apps I have open right now? VMWare. PDF reader. Text editors. IM client. Browsers. Putty. All these apps had to solve a lot of interesting problems.
With web development you don't get to design your application (your web framework connects a method to an url), you don't get to pick an architecture (MVC is always the right solution), there are no algorithms to develop, there is no memory to manage, there is no state space to design.
Web development is about giving people what they want. People want inane things, and the web is the best medium to deliver this inanity. Good business? Occasionally. Difficult computer science? Hardly.
Re: Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming
#29"The reason most people want to program for the web is that they're not smart enough to do anything else"
The reason most people want to program for the web is that web is such an interesting and huge thing that is happening now and many people want to be a part of it and many others dream to make loads of money of it.
Web programming is not inherently bad compared to desktop programming. Of course there are many bad programmers who develop websites juts by reading a few ASP or PHP tutorials. But that cannot be generalized to say that all web programmers are bad. There were lot of bad programmers in the desktop world too. (Remember VB?)
"The reason most people want to program for the web is that they're not smart enough to do anything else"
Most of the people are not smart (at least when we look at them from our narrow perspectives). They are everywhere - in the desktop as well as in the web.
At the same time you will see that the ratio of good programmers to bad ones is orders of magnitude higher in some specialized fields like compiler design or kernel design. Just remember that this is not a sign that all good programmers are in the desktop. It just means that smart people tend to cluster around in places where other smart people are. There are places in the web where the ratio of smart people to dump ones is higher. Think about the engineers in Google/Youtube. Cloud computing and distributed computing are all hard problems too.
Re: Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming
#30I, for one, welcome our new Javascript-kernel overlords.
Seriously, what is he talking about? You could perhaps make the argument that GUI apps are by-and-large web-based at this point, but his argument is just as bad as the one he's arguing against: frontend development is not the only development.