Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming

Personally, the vast majority of programs I use on a regular basis are desktop based, and I cannot find a good web app to replace them (some of them have web app versions, but sorely lacking in features I need): Python, PyDee (soon to be renamed Spyder), MS Outlook, MS Word, SQL Server Management Studio (and associated suite like SSIS...), MS Excel GIMP

And when I have a few free minutes for a game, it is on a disc in a PS3.

Also, when I do my own personal programming (I'm a DBA, not developer by trade, but I do little custom things for myself and friends at night), I can do them both more easily and in a more polished fashion for a desktop gui than by running them through a browser. This may change as browsers mature (and I learn more about browser based programming) but for right now I find desktop apps are almost always higher quality than the web based versions.

Agreed, but some is productive, and while I disagree with much of what he says, he often sparks productive conversation.

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. True, but that is where most people need help. People working on the hard problems probably both know how to generate the answers themselves and know that they will find little help on those on the forums.

I'm a systems programmer who is trying to pick up a greater deal of algorithm and data structure knowledge. I view applications as moving to the web but for web application to become efficient, scalable and allow for the same rich UI as a desktop application a great deal of difficult systems engineering and algorithm development had to happen first. More so than for a desktop application.

Desktop applications typically store individual user data: you could easily use an O(N) lookup structure to store it and then use just write() to write it out to disk as a C struct. Web applications are multi-tenant. For the largest web applications, even a relational database (an incredibly complex system: transaction protocols, b+trees for storage) can't scale.

Before any reputable company puts their name on application, the application has to be load balanced. Yet, this is transparent to the user. Do typical desktop applications require a shared nothing distributed architecture?

Now on the other hand, web developers don't think about these issues and write in powerful, high-level languages using frameworks and DSLs which often times don't even require writing SQL code. Yet, they aren't doing in this in vacuum.

So really the case here is that web application development appears, on the surface, to be less challenging than desktop application development. Yet the amount of systems programming that had to happen to allow that is immense.

Am I now saying that systems programming is more challenging than applications development? No, the challenges are different. I don't have nearly the sort of patience and attention to detail that UI development requires. The process (gathering user requirements, presenting mockups) is actually more complex.

If you're looking to do lower-level work, or more algorithm/data structure development because that's what you find challenging than don't be an applications developer (whether desktop or web). On the other hand, be aware that the demand for systems programmers isn't always as high (and getting the job is a lot more difficult in terms of complexity of even the interview and the experience/education level required).

On the other hand, before web developers bash statically typed languages (especially C/C++), bash CS curiculla that stress algorithms and data structures or wonder why interviewers at Google/Yahoo/Facebook ask about Binary Trees, they should be aware just how much of C/C++ code was written for them to be able to do even the simplest of SELECT statements (and if you don't know what data structures might have been traversed when you issued that statement, I won't hire you).

The original comment had to do with amateur programmers that can't do anything else other than write simple php with complete disregard to the complexity of computer science. But when you're making a scalable commercial webservice, you need to know a quite a bit about compilers, concurrency, inheritance, and hardware. Probably the only major difference is that you learn about html + css + ajax instead of MFC (or gasp visual basic).

Software is about the value to the end user, but it's also about cost. When you want to be efficient, you can't just use the simplest tool to implement the features, you need to know much more about the specifics. It just so happens that web development is easier to do poorly than desktop programming.