All Programming is Web Programming

This Michael Braude guy clearly missed the boat. It’s funny and sad.

Writing ASP.NET apps and generating BO’s & SP’s for so long - this post stung a bit.

i good like it website.

One of the problems of web programming as it stands today is that it is akin to the original incarnation of BASIC in the programnming world. With BASIC there was no need to define variables before use, and lack of structural discipline encouraged spaghetti code. As its’ name implied it was a programming language to demonstrate the basics, but should never be used for production code of a serious nature.

Web programming is here to stay, but the language underlying it has got to change to make it more reliable and less prone to security issues which are often related to the “just knocked up” nature of many websites out there. Someone needs to come along and define a web language that has the same disciplines as a compiled, strongly typed language such as Delphi does in the programming world. If there is such a thing already, what is it called? If it relies upon HTML for delivery then it is still vulnerable.

I have experienced Atwood’s Law! My Toastmasters club wanted a way to assign meeting roles fairly. I volunteered to write a program. First I tried in C. Then I rewrote it in C++. Not wanting to restrict it to Macs, and not wanting to recompile for multiple platforms, I rewrote it in Python, aiming to integrate it with FreeToastHost (a service that makes free web sites for Toastmasters clubs, including a duty roster manager). When that didn’t quite work… I rewrote it in JavaScript, and pulled the data from FreeToastHost by AJAX.

For the curious, a demo is available at http://www.davearonson.com/darts/darts.html .

And BTW, I’m for hire… and want to apply more modern languages than C/C++…

PLONK!

Hey Now Jeff,

It’s true,

All programming will is web programming.

Coding Horror Fan,
Catto

What a giant pile of comments! Well, I must get my two cents in, because hell, it’s a comment form on the internet! Of course people care about my opinion.

So I wonder why programming remains so male dominated… Could it have something to do with this culture of pissing contests? My compiler is bigger and more complicated than your compiler! I sure hope that technology that’s easy enough that anyone could use it doesn’t become popular, because if programming becomes mainstream I won’t be able to be as convincing at projecting an aura of condescention at anyone who can’t program a computer.

Oh hay you, just because I can’t program in assembler doesn’t mean I’m dumb. Really. My mom said I’m smart.

Do we really have to play these dumb games to prove our own worth? Does it matter what technology you used? Does anyone who isn’t a programmer actually care whether their word processor was written in C or in Javascript? If you’re a designer who knows some ruby and rails, and you put together a really cute web app that keeps track of your kitten photos, and it just works really well, and really easily, and everyone loves it, does anyone care that the guy who programmed it has never heard of djikstra?

Does that guy really need to argue that really he’s just as good at programmming as the guy that wrote some software to sequence DNA? Will anyone other than the stinky bearded guy that nobody will invite to parties really notice? Haha, what a retard, that guy might have millions of dollars and 5 girlfriends, but I bet he can’t approximate travelling salesman! I’m still better than you!

Javascript is the language of the future!!! Yippiee!!! Everything that can be become JS will be JS. Yippiee!!!
Prophet Atwood has had a vision and and the messias maybe is John Resig!! Hallelujah!!

Alert that people!!!

And I thought iPhone apps are popular.

Wait.

Jongnam’s Theorem: “Any subject that can be taught in JavaScript, will eventually be taught in JavaScript.”

This is hardly true, I write applications for high volume data reduction in real time. While the results of of this data reduction may end up as a Web driven front end, the acquisition and reduction of this data to a usable form could not and should never become a web application.

I agree that Web driven apps are the wave for the presentation layer, much more goes on within computing than the presentation layer.

I hate old people :frowning:

Web programming isn’t for everyone. It’s ridiculous to claim that web programming is for practically incompetent programmer. As with any field, the difficulty of the work depends on the scope of the project.

Sure, any idiot can design a blog, but not everyone can design a facebook from scratch (not just the core functionality, but also the cache system, business intelligence, etc.).

Web programming is still programming. Difficulty of projects can range from a crappy blog, to Google.

If web programming is for idiots, I’m sure all of you hardcore old-school programmers can make the switch with ease. Don’t let your own stubbornness bring you down.

Web programming isn’t better or worse, and it certainly isn’t everything. Although everything may end up tied to the web stuff like JavaScript, PHP, ASP.net etc are woefully inadequate for any kind of real time simulation of sound, graphics, physics etc… we are a long way off from not needing local processing to handle these.

Its also true that the learning curve is substantially shallower… but I disagree that this makes it easier to solve the hard web programming problems. They are still hard, no matter how good the toolset available is at doing work for you… if anything that makes it harder.

I HATE WEB APPLICATIONS:

And simply do not use them most of the time.

If i buy an application i can install it in a few years. (And for some applications by gone companies this is needed to get some data).

If the web vendor is gone you have nothing. No possibility to get the “program” back, small possibillities to get data back.

I even hate it if a software need some kind of online activation. Microsoft prvides us at business with usb sticks for Windows activation. This sticks will run even if no online activation will be possible any longer.

Web is a bubble. The more data people will loose by trusting web application, the sooner they will use more installed programms.

Web can be used for all sorts of social things (communities, mails, groupware), but to be true, even for parts like groupware i have not seen anything webbish which can be compared to exchange/outlook.

Wow…so it’s death knell week on codinghorror, eh? First COBOL and now the Desktop? I’ve been hearing about the demise of the Desktop for 15+ years now. When, exactly, is it dead?

Joe Baltimore on August 14, 2009 6:41 AM

it is dead as soon as… ohm… Linux is the number one os for the masses with hurd as kernel. :wink:

Its unfair to say that web developers are incompetent, I believe every job has its own challenges. Had internet connectivity been very good time you started career in programming, I bet you too would have been an web developer (lol).

May be the effort required to develop a web application is less when compared to desktop application, however its equally challenging. This too requires lot of planning and UML’s are part of that process.

Anyways its all with the development team, it may end up as a crap or …

I would suggest that the goal of writing apps is not to use all the fanciest tools, but to fill a need. Sometimes you need a tack hammer, sometimes you need a factory.

A simple shopping cart does not need the bag of tools the OP mentions. The back end for a browser-exposed real time trading system likely will benefit from many of these techniques. Sounds like the OP would find his comfort zone more in writing back ends for larger systems than in writing complete small apps. Nothing wrong with that – although it doesn’t seem a compelling reason to complain about the existence of smaller apps.

I recall a presentation by Rasmus Lerdorf, the father of PHP, concerning Yahoo (whose front end is apparently mostly PHP). He scoffed at the notion that ‘Yahoo is written in PHP’. His point, as I recall, is that the front end is PHP, but there are hundreds of function units (modules) that were rewritten in C for performance and scalability.

Fancy stuff is not going away – the need will still be there. It is just refreshing to be able to do some of the simple screen and database stuff without bringing in the heavy artillery.

I think you’re completly wrong with the first part.

Web-Dev’s aren’t so bad in everything what you were speaking of (I only agree with you when we are speaking of complete noobs - but I couldnt read a word about that) nor did none of them ever see certain preperation techniques…

In my opinion, it depends on where you are working and what requirements are being set on the work you have to do.

I personally work in a small company in Germany where it’s completely normal to do exactly those things of which you say, none of us does.

/phenyll

Well, you are both right and wrong.

No, the web of today is ACTUALLY stupid, thats why it has not taken over everything. Just name one game that any console has developed having at least a 100000 followers that is online. Not the stupid RPG’s, I am talking number crunchers here(Halo, Mass Effect, Black, anything remotely viable to be called a real game).

The web of tomorrow, just like many of the other technologies, with age might become better. All the threading concepts and everything might become really useful in a web-page, but right now its not the case buddy.