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Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming

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Re: Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming

#51

Post by pj »

Mintz wrote: post #41
edw519 wrote: post #9

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 blog is that they're not smart enough to program for the web.

Yeah, because StackOverflow.com is a shining example of Jeff's ineptitude. Jeff declares bold, out-there statements probably more than his fair share, but he's sparking beneficial conversations that get people talking (even if it's about how wrong he is). You might think his conclusions are brash and useless, but he's contributing to the programming community more than he's hindering it. Personal putdowns aren't help…

I don't think "sparking conversation" in and of itself is a good thing. Most conversation is mundane, boring, and a waste of time.

The problem with Atwood is that his popularity on the web is an example of the stupidification of web programming. People who build web apps flock to him because he has become successful on the web, not because what he says is true, enlightening, or even beneficial to their success as a hacker.

The web is popular for wannabe's because they get exposure. They think they are hackers, but really they are just factory line workers assembling someone else's code.

In most forums I frequent, the majority of questions are from people asking how to get some FOSS project to work, not how to code some particular algorithm or do something hard. They don't do any research. One of the questions on stack overflow right now is if it's possible to find where sql server database files are stored. Seriously? If you can't do something like that, why are you trying to build a web app?? It's one of the most basic things in sql server.

I think at the moment, we're in a web programming bubble, fueled not by the love of money, or the love of programming, but the love of popularity. This love is shared by many because we all want to be loved.

Re: Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming

#52

Post by megaman821 »

nudded wrote: post #16
seldo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Webapps can never be as powerful as a desktop application You're confusing technology with user interface. The primary difference between web apps and desktop apps in the future will be the idioms they use in their user interfaces. Offline storage and various other HTML 5 APIs mean that there will be nothing a web app can do that a desktop app can't. Web apps might never be as efficient as a desktop app -- compiled…

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.

No with a Photoshop-like web app the server is simply sending javascript to your computer where it runs in your browser. There may be some interesting things like identifying the location of your picture that happen server-side, but things like filter will usually run client side.

Re: Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming

#53

Post by ogdoad »

Well one could lean on the anti-web/cloud-apps case a bit heavier taking into account the bits and pieces of paranoia that easily stem from a centrally-operated system, where admin is god, a big corp has your files etc. Capitalism goes BOFH I guess. Then again, centralization also evokes images of Brazil and the french Minitel system, which, all things considered, were quite cool (and the Minitel still holds some ground).

I suppose by talking of 'web programming' one immediatelly thinks of PHP, and thus the horror, but there are quite a few other things that are considered web programming and do not promote bad practices. Then again, if the Cloud is the wave of the future, we can but ride it out.

Re: Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming

#54

Post by far33d »

donaq wrote: post #34
far33d wrote: post #8

I love the "I like using tools like this because they are hard and it makes me feel smarter than everyone else" attitude. I understand everything on the little laundry list, including things I wish I'd never had to do (UML diagrams, for instance), but choose to work on the web. Why? Because I prefer my "hard problems" to be customer problems, not technical ones. I'm happy to work on hard technical problems when produ…

Doing hard things for the sake of it, or for no other reason than to find out if you can do it, is the very essence of hacking. It is also precisely that attitude which fuels research, discovery and invention. So while I can respect your preference for solving customer issues rather than technical ones, I don't think you should diss people who prefer working on technical ones either. Are you saying there's no glory f…

You are right - doing things just because is a big part of the essence of hacking.

I fully respect all the work of people who work on "hard problems" - I even believe that I have and continue to work on "hard problems" every day. The list of things the OP used were basically "skills" not problems (virtual destruction semantics, references, pointers, etc). It's the attitude I dislike, not the desire to do hard things. The attitude that "these things are hard to understand and therefore more interesting and more worthy" is ridiculous, and shows that the writer doesn't actually understand any of the things he hasn't worked on.

I don't diss people working on hard things - I diss people who call everyone who doesn't work on what they work on weenies.

Re: Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming

#55

Post by far33d »

donaq wrote: post #34
far33d wrote: post #8

I love the "I like using tools like this because they are hard and it makes me feel smarter than everyone else" attitude. I understand everything on the little laundry list, including things I wish I'd never had to do (UML diagrams, for instance), but choose to work on the web. Why? Because I prefer my "hard problems" to be customer problems, not technical ones. I'm happy to work on hard technical problems when produ…

Doing hard things for the sake of it, or for no other reason than to find out if you can do it, is the very essence of hacking. It is also precisely that attitude which fuels research, discovery and invention. So while I can respect your preference for solving customer issues rather than technical ones, I don't think you should diss people who prefer working on technical ones either. Are you saying there's no glory f…

also, don't get me wrong - I'm a technical guy. 90% of each of my days is spent messing around with complicated and complex problems in code. That's what I do, and I respect everyone else who does that. That's WHY I believe the original sentiment is so flawed. Just because you use C and have to deal with tricky memory issues doesn't actually make the problems you solve any more interesting or useful. There's plenty of useless code in any language.

Re: Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming

#56

Post by jimbokun »

nickelplate wrote: post #31

People like to say that the web is replacing the desktop, but is this really the case? When I look at the web applications I use on a regular basis (Amazon, craigslist, LinkedIn...) I cannot think of a desktop app they have displaced. I cannot say, for example, that "I stopped using desktop application X because Amazon is so much better". On the other hand, my trips to the book store are less frequent because of Amaz…

When a new computing platform arrives, it usually doesn't really replace the existing applications one for one. It makes the old applications less relevant.

A blog is not a replacement for a word processor. But many of the things you might have written, printed out, copied, and distributed to people you wanted to see it, you just type into your blog and you're done with it. And blogs make new kinds of writing possible that wasn't before, meaning even less time spent in front of a word processor.

When several people needed to work on the same document before, they put a word processing document on a network share, or just emailed it around to the next person who had to work on it. Now, a wiki makes a lot more sense for editing and sharing that kind of data.

A desktop money management application can't compete with a web application that can keep your transactions up to date for all of your online financial accounts. I suppose you could implement this as a desktop application, but most of the power comes from the data being available from the web, so what's the point?

People used to use a spreadsheet or desktop database to store and process their financial data, but it makes more sense for the logic for handling your financial data living close to that data, in a way that a lot of people can benefit from without typing in all the formulas themselves. So the use cases for the average person to use a spreadsheet diminish.

The end result, is that people don't really care whether they have a direct replacement for their old apps. As long as they have a convenient way to meet the end result (communicate, manage finances), that's all that matters.

Re: Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming

#57

Post by jrockway »

I am not sure why the original blogger thinks web programming is any different from any other type of programming. In a web app, we do:

    handleRequest :: HttpRequest -> AppState -> (AppState, HttpResponse)
In a GUI desktop app, we do:

    handleEvent :: Event -> AppState -> (AppState, [WindowUpdates])
(The AppState is stuff like your config files, or database connections, etc., etc. You have some state in your function, you change it, and then the next invocation of your function uses the new state. You might not always write that explicitly, but it's how you think about it.)

The only difference here is in the format of the "input" and "output". Inside, we use the same programming techniques. We solve the same complex problems, and produce the same valuable results.

(But not, he's right, I don't use UML diagrams and multiple inheritance. There are much sharper tools available to me.)

Re: Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming

#59

Post by silentOpen »

teppefall wrote: post #32
wwalker3 wrote: post #7

Once technologies like Google's Native Client take off, the web browser becomes merely the installer and updater for my native app. And it'll be none too soon -- then we can abandon the doomed effort to somehow cobble together huge, powerful apps like Maya and Photoshop out of a mess of JavaScript and XML.

That makes no sense to me. Google Native Client is just a desperate attempt to hide expensive code from other companies. How many nuclear power plants, switches, routers, undersea pipelines, servers and UPS systems are needed to run a Facebook turd-app connected to Google DRM anyway ? Talking about the slowness of Javascript is amusing when 856 sub-systems needs to be operational for a Web 2.0 "Hello World". Give me…

That makes no sense to me. What does everything after the second sentence have to do with NaCl?

Re: Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming

#60

Post by alex_c »

sgk284 wrote: post #42
gizmo wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who cares about platform or depth of technical knowledge? The programmer does. There are a lot of really smart programmers that just want to work on interesting challenges. And if you're the kind of programmer that enjoys solving difficult problems, you're not going to find many when building web 2.0 apps.

Really, you believe that? The two challenges that immediately come to mind are scaling and data mining, but there are a number of others. The use cases presented by the web have pushed distributed computing further than any other single thing in computing history. The web is just the interface the user interacts with... the stuff that's going on behind the scenes is still really interesting and very challenging. Buil…

Not really, most web apps are just CRUD (and MVC if you're lucky). What percentage of all web apps (remember, this includes apps that are only ever used on a corporate intranet) ever get to tackle scaling or data mining?
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