Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming • Hacker News Board

Re: Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming

#71

Post by brandon272 » Fri, Aug 14, 2009, 5:19 PM UTC

michael_dorfman wrote: post #12

Jeff 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…

He didn't say "All programming is web programming", he said, "All programming will be web programming".

Re: Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming

#72

Post by c00p3r » Fri, Aug 14, 2009, 5:31 PM UTC

That guy was right - a browser is a platform nowadays. It means yes, Javascript gets ground from Delphi, Java and .NET

But he missed one thing - all browsers, v8 engine, most of rdbmses and even jvm were written in C++ and almost everything on a server side written in C. =)

Re: Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming

#73

Post by bmelton » Fri, Aug 14, 2009, 5:37 PM UTC

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.

Well, for what it's worth, it's true at least in my case.

I honestly don't have the experience to build file system indexing, low level crypto modules, etc. I could never build a database, period.

I consider web programming to be the way of the future, so I've never bothered to learn the things I would need to fill those gaps, but at the same time, I do understand that you often have to write filesystem things to be served over the web.

Simply put, if you can do it in Python, I'm your guy -- if it needs to be C or (gasp) Assembly, I am absolutely NOT your guy (tho I have dabbled, for the goofs.)

While it is an overly broad, sweeping statement that simply doesn't work for a lot of developers, it is at least true in plenty of cases. I might not be representative of the average, but I'm guessing most web devs do consider web development an easier way out. I certainly did.

Re: Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming

#74

Post by capsid » Fri, Aug 14, 2009, 5:52 PM UTC

graywh wrote: post #35

cjbos wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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). Thi…

Web programming generally means stuff that runs in the browser; not networking/sockets, etc.

When these discussions come up, focus drifts towards the "all apps should be browser apps" contention. That's silly, but it's true that more and more apps can benefit from networked components. Would I want to run photoshop in my browser? Hell no, not for a few tech generations. But, would I like photoshop to automagically backup my assets and edit history onto some highly-available, redundantly stored file server? Defintely.

Re: Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming

#75

Post by mrshoe » Fri, Aug 14, 2009, 5:53 PM UTC

Jeff failed to point out the most absurd aspect of the blog post he quotes: balking at new technologies because they make life easier. Isn't that the entire point of technology? How can you be in a tech field and maintain that attitude?

I think that Braude feeds his ego by assuring himself that his ability to program a computer must prove that he's smarter than everyone else. Now that programming has become easier and anyone can do it (which is not even close to the reality of the situation), he feels less special. It's so ironic when technologists resent technological advances for this reason.

That all programmers don't need to know about "virtual methods, pointers, references, garbage collection, finalizers, pass-by-reference vs. pass-by-value, virtual C++ destructors, or the differences between C# structs and classes" is a very good thing. Lots of that stuff is ugly and overcomplicated and poorly designed and error-prone. The reason that large classes of programmers needn't pay any attention to any of it is that the state of the art has advanced and newer, better designed technologies are at our disposal now. As technologists, how can we do anything but celebrate that?

Re: Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming

#76

Post by mojonixon » Fri, Aug 14, 2009, 5:56 PM UTC

Both of these posts, Atwood's and Braude's, are complete messes. Braude tries to compare the development of entire desktop applications with the UI development/document presentation of web applications. Web UI development should be compared to UI development on the desktop. I wish I could use Swing/GTK/Qt for my web UIs, or write my blog with Word, but instead we have to use HTML and DOM scripting. The web is a crappy UI framework with an excellent distribution method. The internal differences of desktop applications and web applications are typically a matter of scale.

"Atwood's Law: any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript." Dear god, no! The browser is not the web. The future is not photoshop in a browser, it's a photoshop UI (hopefully developed with a rational desktop GUI framework) with a network connection (HTTP?) to a processing server. Of course, that's not particularly new, it's X11.

Re: Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming

#77

Post by wicknicks » Fri, Aug 14, 2009, 6:01 PM UTC

Ah! Now I know where the crap from M$ comes from.

Re: Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming

#78

Post by marklubi » Fri, Aug 14, 2009, 6:20 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #44

wreel wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

After seeing what google docs is capable of it is only a matter of time before even things like photoshop will be web oriented. Just the other day I was looking for a visio replacement, on a hunch I asked here if somebody knew of a web based version of it and I got two viable suggestions. Now, 5 years ago that would have been laughed at with 'that will never happen'. Now it is there. Give it another 5 years and who k…

Additionally, regarding the online image editing, people might want to check out the suite of web-based tools over at http://aviary.com/

Some pretty impressive stuff going on out there.

Re: Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming

#79

Post by wwalker3 » Fri, Aug 14, 2009, 6:27 PM UTC

LegionSB wrote: post #65

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.

>> "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." Or, you know, we could develop better tools for the web . I'm amazed that this discussion always takes the stance that we're stuck with what we're using for web development now, as if nobody could possibly develop better languages and tools for web use.

That's exactly my point -- NaCl would make languages and tools available to web app developers which have already proven their worth in developing complex, graphically intense application interfaces on the desktop.

Re: Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming

#80

Post by CodeMage » Fri, Aug 14, 2009, 6:39 PM UTC

Here's a funny little tidbit about Michael Braude's post: there's more to it than what Jeff Atwood quoted and focused on in Blogging Horror. What's more, in the context of the whole post, it makes a lot sense.

If HN audience has one blind spot, it's the fact that not everyone is an entrepreneur, working on their brand new startup, boldly going where (hopefully) no one has gone before. Believe it or not, it's really true that there's a whole lot of people out there who choose web programming because it's easy enough. There's no shortage of companies whose primary business is not software, where you can find a job that involves hammering out JEE applications using Struts (or just plain old servlets and JSPs), EJBs and one or more databases. I recently interviewed a candidate for a Java developer position who has spent 9 years in that same comfort zone, never venturing out of it at all.

Yes, Jeff, you did a great job with Stack Overflow. I use it frequently and I really love it. No, it's not trivial. Nothing worth doing is trivial. And no, not all programming will be web programming. Not without redefining "web" to mean something a lot different from what it means now. Case in point: game programming is (mostly) not web programming. Now can we please move on to a post that doesn't revolve around an exaggerated claim for shock value?