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The self-hating web developer

joequery.me

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Re: The self-hating web developer

#31

Post by Xophmeister »

Like many here, I don't believe in the OP's premise that web development isn't real programming, but likewise, I really hate it too! When I have to do it, I much prefer getting involved with the backend-side of things; I loathe frontend development. My main reasons being:

1. The framework churn at this point is beyond ridiculous. In my last/current project, I just gave up and wrote everything by hand with a bit of jQuery for DOM manipulation. It may not be pretty, it may not scale, but it actually works, it took me maybe a day-and-a-half (rather than the weeks of time I've lost experimenting with Framework X) and it will be tractable when I (or some other developer) comes back to it in the future.

2. Ultimately, by in large, web development is just making CRUD applications. Having to go through all that pain and not having much to show for it at the end (in terms of novelty) is kind of soul destroying! When one writes, say, a command line tool, that's ultimately more about manipulation. In my mind, doing creative things with data is much more interesting than simply providing a means to store it.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#32

Post by meowface »

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…

>The "language hate" in programming is truly cancerous.

I agree with you... except when it comes to PHP. PHP is more toxic than language wars are. (I am aware of the irony in that statement.)

Re: The self-hating web developer

#33

Post by gaius »

Animats wrote: post #3

That's sad. Web development is hard for all the wrong reasons. There are so many layers of bad, half-broken stuff to deal with, encapsulated in new, half-broken stuff. Worse, it has fads. Sign: "It has been [0] days since the last new Javascript framework." Web developers must run very hard to stay in the same place. It's hard to get excited about this, when in the end, the result is usually a web page which could ha…

It is a game I play, to look at a website and say, what does this do that we couldn't have done on an IBM 3270 terminal, in FORTRAN? Or on the Amiga?

The ONLY difference in the modern world to back then is the ubiquitous bandwidth and the cheap hardware that connects to it. Everything Amazon or Facebook does, you could have done on that old system, if it could be accelerated to run on modern hardware. Software just goes round and round in circles reinventing the wheel with different buzzwords. Everyone wants to do "frameworks" and leave "solving actual problems" to someone else...

Re: The self-hating web developer

#34

Post by gaius »

sombremesa wrote: post #5

Web development is real software development. The people who say or think otherwise usually just don't know any better. That being said, there are different tiers of software development (including web development) in general. Most developers are actually abysmal at architecting good software. This might be down to a number of things - time pressure, lack of experience, lack of skill, apathy, "life happens" etc. Anyw…

If your software is important, you'll write tests.

If your software is REALLY important you'll use a language that stacks the deck in your favour, one that's amenable to static analysis and can stop you doing stupid stuff like mixing units at compile time. Weirdly, programmers are highly resistant to working like this.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#35

Post by gaius »

vdaniuk wrote: post #7
Animats wrote: post #3

That's sad. Web development is hard for all the wrong reasons. There are so many layers of bad, half-broken stuff to deal with, encapsulated in new, half-broken stuff. Worse, it has fads. Sign: "It has been [0] days since the last new Javascript framework." Web developers must run very hard to stay in the same place. It's hard to get excited about this, when in the end, the result is usually a web page which could ha…

Your attitude is exactly the part of the problem described in the post. For me, web development with all its exaggerated quirks and fast evolution of JavaScript frameworks is very exciting.

Exciting in the sense that every project you do is either your first in a particular framework, or involves maintaining or adding features to a project that was someone's first use of it... This is a horrible way to work.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#36

Post by novarac23 »

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…

The conveyor belt metaphor is one of the best that I have ever heard.

It's fine to start out with anything, I did pascal/visual basic in high school. Then did Java/PHP in college. First year of college I did contract work in PHP and in WordPress. It was fun the first year or so and I love that I could have that "instant gratification" moments that PHP is famous for. Then as I grew and learned about things like concurrency, algorithms, HTTP, networking I found myself wondering off to other languages such as Ruby. Then I learned Ruby and now for a year already am doing Rails and Angular and truly enjoy it.

The thing to note here is back in a day when I was doing PHP , I heard a lot from community members and other software engineers saying something like "PHP SUCKS" and stuff like that, but I did not care because everything I wanted to build in that time I could do with procedural PHP or some OOP php or some Wordpress magic. When I realized and knew `why` I want to learn other stuff everything became clear.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#37

Post by spion »

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…

I think its a double-edged sword.

On one hand, it does have the disastrous effects described in the article. On the other, those kind of comments from some FP programmers did turn my attention to FP languages. Turns out, there is this amazing group of people that are trying to build an entire ecosystem that stands on solid mathematical foundations. That was really exciting stuff for me. For years I've been watching our profession struggle with brilliant but ad-hoc creations, every single time being crushed by its accumulating weight of crutches and of the impossibility to reason about things once they grow to a certain size. Now it seems like we're really close to fixing this (that is, even outside of academia).

But maybe there is a way of getting people's attention without causing unnecessary extra damage. We (as a profession) ought to be able to do better than that...

Re: The self-hating web developer

#38

Post by novarac23 »

hamburglar wrote: post #30
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…

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…

Totally agree about the part where people who can do CSS and HTML and know that '.htaccess' is the file to configure stuff for your Wordpress website call themselves "web devs". And I think people from the engineering world look at those people ( since there is a lot of those people) and put a lot of hate on that title. I know this for a fact because I know a few people that are calling themselves just that "web devs". And when ever I get into talking about anything more advanced then CSS and PHP if statments they get lost. Things like concurrency, microservices, encryption etc. Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong to be that person, everybody starts there, but you need to evolve.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#39

Post by vdaniuk »

gaius wrote: post #35
vdaniuk wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your attitude is exactly the part of the problem described in the post. For me, web development with all its exaggerated quirks and fast evolution of JavaScript frameworks is very exciting.

Exciting in the sense that every project you do is either your first in a particular framework, or involves maintaining or adding features to a project that was someone's first use of it... This is a horrible way to work.

Do you have any data to confirm your statement about web developers doing X where X is your claims about first projects?

Re: The self-hating web developer

#40

Post by im3w1l »

vdaniuk wrote: post #7
Animats wrote: post #3

That's sad. Web development is hard for all the wrong reasons. There are so many layers of bad, half-broken stuff to deal with, encapsulated in new, half-broken stuff. Worse, it has fads. Sign: "It has been [0] days since the last new Javascript framework." Web developers must run very hard to stay in the same place. It's hard to get excited about this, when in the end, the result is usually a web page which could ha…

Your attitude is exactly the part of the problem described in the post. For me, web development with all its exaggerated quirks and fast evolution of JavaScript frameworks is very exciting.

If we disregard "It's hard to get excited about this," which is just parent's subjective opinion, I think it's a plausible criticism of the field. Do you think it is wrong, and could you back it up?
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