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The self-hating web developer

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Re: The self-hating web developer

#181

Post by nicholas73 »

Funny, coming from an electronics background, I can understand the stack down to the metal. But from my point of view, the further away from the metal you are, the further you are away from monkey work.

The author could not have flipped things more on its head to me. It's ALL monkey work, in that it's a lot of tedious glue work and calculations. Except the higher level you are, the easier it is to be executing your vision, rather than meeting some spec.

You are a lot more likely to come up with a webapp business idea, than you are going to have the opportunity to design the next CPU or what not.

Business matters aside, I also find coding challenges to be more like puzzles, whereas circuits to be like a stack of math problems. If you don't like being a code monkey try being a (used) human calculator!

Grass is greener, I suppose.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#182

Post by PopeOfNope »

justwannasing wrote: post #77
austenallred wrote: post #9

The "language hate" in programming is truly cancerous. I know several people who started programming only to get twisted and turned around by experienced developers saying, "Don't learn PHP" then "Rails is a joke and doesn't scale well." I talk to them a week later, and they're trying to build a simple web app in functional Haskell, and their environment is all messed up because they are using a zsh configuration the…

Well, now you know one who started out writing machine code. And I'll tell you, don't learn PHP and Rails is a joke and doesn't scale well. But any noob switching to Haskell to do a simple web app is equally insane.

What's your favorite web language, then?

Re: The self-hating web developer

#183

Post by crimsonalucard »

codingdave wrote: post #147
crimsonalucard wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right, or course, in terms of semantic politeness. The OP is, however, referring to the difference between say a ruby developer versus someone who just writes html and css. If both are within the category of web developers, what are some names to distinguish the two?

Why do we need to distinguish the two? Doctors are all doctors, but there is a difference between a family doctor and a neurosurgeon. Lawyers are all lawyers, but a patent attorney is not a criminal litigation specialist. It is fine to have a generic term for a broad profession, then get more specific if and when it matters.

There would be. Because someone who only knows html and css has never really encountered an if-else statement in there entire lives. It's really hard for me to consider someone who doesn't know what an if-else statement to be a "programmer".

Perhaps, though, I can still refer to these people as "developers."

Re: The self-hating web developer

#184

Post by crimsonalucard »

vinceguidry wrote: post #111
crimsonalucard wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right, or course, in terms of semantic politeness. The OP is, however, referring to the difference between say a ruby developer versus someone who just writes html and css. If both are within the category of web developers, what are some names to distinguish the two?

Front end vs. back end.

That's different. What do you call someone who knows html and css but no javascript? "Designer" might be the industry term.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#185

Post by wwweston »

hex13 wrote: post #110
hamburglar wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that "web dev" covers such a wide range of roles. "Uploading WordPress isn't web development" is a subjective statement, and a lot of people who can only do CSS and very minor code copy/paste/tweak get to call themselves "web devs." This OP sounds like someone who got in a rung or two above "uploads WordPress" and has convinced himself he needs to transform into a full-fledged ninja programmer in order…

> lot of people who can only do CSS I appreciate people "who can only do CSS". CSS is underrated skill but experienced CSS developer has to know about: - every browser quirk possible. - various standard hacks to workaround these quirks - preprocessors like Sass or Less - tons of completely non-logical CSS rules (eg: `margin: auto` will center only horizontally but not vertically ) - methodologies like BEM, OCSS or SM…

> - every browser quirk possible.

Hah. Not even possible anymore. Used to be before mobile, but as far as I can tell with mobile there is nobody who knows where all the bodies are buried.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23142762/how-to-identify-...

Re: The self-hating web developer

#186

Post by hebdo »

pekk wrote: post #175
hebdo wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. It is not abuse to honestly review a patch or an idea, and block its progress pointing out serious deficiencies. This is just a way to assert quality, and apparently it is a very effective way - we do trust Linux. You are not the code you write. Accept the critical comments and improve.

Honesty is not abuse. But abuse is often misrepresented as honesty, and intolerance of abuse is often misrepresented as an inability to accept useful criticism. Anyone who is actually concerned about honesty should be able to recognize the existence of abuse and draw a clear distinction between the two. But if every time abuse is brought up, you pretend that honesty was brought up, accuse the speaker of attacking hon…

You have a valid point. It is, indeed, possible and often quite easy to misclassify abuse as criticism. However, I disagree with this part:

> Considering consequences, it's probably even more important to be able to take criticism on doing active harm to others than to take criticism on the importance of garbage collection.

All three major operating systems, this is Windows, Mac OS and Linux, all have or had leaders (Gates, Jobs, Torvalds) that on numerous occasions proved themselves to be harsh and very open about their criticism. One might want to say - they were/are class-A assholes. What we want to believe is one thing, but the recent history of major operating systems disagrees with your point of view.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#187

Post by pjc50 »

pekk wrote: post #176
liviu- wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE F★CKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the f★ck does idiotic things like that? How did they not die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?" - Linus Torvalds, principal author of the Linux kernel

Linus was speaking abusively there, but he wasn't just speaking abusively: there was a context. That context wasn't that Linus spends hours every week trolling Reddit by putting people down and making snarky remarks about every new project. The comparison to Linus is really irrelevant and needs to stop.

It's not irrelevant, because it continues to be used to legitimize abuse.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#188

Post by stephenboyd »

justwannasing wrote: post #76
skrebbel wrote: post #12

For all of those who, like the OP, believe web dev isn't real programming: - it is - uploading WordPress isn't web development I worked in embedded systems for a few years, and let me tell you, the quality of people is exactly the same as in web dev. They do pointer arithmetic all the time (way too much), we pass functions to functions all the time (way too much). They use ancient compilers and tools, we invent a new…

I worked in embedded programming, systems programming and, now, web dev. No. The "quality of people" is not generally the same or, more specifically, you're less likely to find PHP coders among system developers.

You must be using 'PHP coders' as an insult quite regularly to not notice what you've literally said. Of course systems programmers use system programming languages rather than web programming languages.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#189

Post by overgard »

Domenic_S wrote: post #169
Udo wrote: post #101

The motivation behind developers dissing each other for their chosen field of work and their tools is absolutely puzzling, and it does real harm. Nobody would assert that printf("hello world!"); epitomizes systems programming, yet print($foo); is apparently considered synonymous with web development and lowest of the unspeakable arts. Inept programming can be found all over the place. A newbie program doesn't magical…

> PHP is considered a beginner-grade toy, despite the comparatively vast expertise one needs to write correct code in it. As someone who's built a career on (mostly) writing PHP, this this this . It is indeed incredibly easy to write "working", terrible, insecure PHP. Honestly, people who write garbage PHP would write garbage rails/python/node too, because the errors fall into a few buckets: 1. Not using a framework'…

I think the real counter argument would be: why would you use a language where it's easy to screw up in subtle ways as opposed to a language that makes it much harder to screw up, if all else is roughly equal. PHP is a minefield in ways most other languages aren't. Part of writing fewer bugs is setting yourself up with tools and practices that make writing bugs harder.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#190

Post by justwannasing »

PopeOfNope wrote: post #182
justwannasing wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, now you know one who started out writing machine code. And I'll tell you, don't learn PHP and Rails is a joke and doesn't scale well. But any noob switching to Haskell to do a simple web app is equally insane.

What's your favorite web language, then?

We don't use a "web language" unless you include our use of javascript. We make custom sites using C cause we can and it does everything any other language does. We just might switch to Go cause it already contains the libraries we wrote for C years ago but Go makes it more universal to those outside our company.
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