The web is just an interface, like winforms, swing, QT, GTK, TCL, etc. It is an interface with inherent benefits, such as deployment-less updates, but an interface nonetheless
Trust me, as a programmer for a VERY large company, some very complex applications are written in the insurance/financial (among others) sectors that are accessible strictly through a web UI. To do it any other way would be an IT and support nightmare of version hell.
The web UI is the very tip, of the tip, of the iceberg; itâs a means to an end. The challenge comes in developing faster, highly-scalable, highly fault-tolerant, applications that can cooperate with the various technology stacks. Then you get into SOA and the challenges of aggregating, transporting and transforming data across a global enterprise where milliseconds count.
I have developed in C/C++ for ~10 years and prefer the challenges of large-scale web application development over tripping through the minefield of unnecessary, archaic, tedium that is C/C++.
Huh⌠what a lot of comments for such a silly topic.
Unfortunately it seems we are getting back to making divisive comments just to get comments and reactions without adding to the community debate.
Well⌠it worked and Iâm commenting.
I disagree with your premise, your reasoning and your conclusions.
My personal belief is that the line between desktop and web applications will blur to the point that âapplicationsâ will no longer have the âdesktopâ and âwebâ attribute applied. People will continue to be âprogrammersâ, and the distinction between âwebâ and âdesktopâ programmers will end up being as meaningless as⌠well⌠as meaningless as the distinction is today.
But so what if Iâm right and so what if youâre right? How is that affecting me in my job today? Come on â this site has some good historic posts on day-to-day development issues. Please bring back those good old days!!!
I should also point out that you completely misunderstand the term âLawâ. âLawâ is actually a statistical term for a distribution and NOT used in the sense that the statement MUST be adhered to. So âMooreâs Lawâ is a statement about the distribution of processor speed over time. It specifies the probability of âYâ (flops) will be a specific value given specific âXâ (time) value.
That is: Y = a * X+ b, where b is a specific stating point and a is a growth factor. THATâS a Law.
There are lots of them, some of them interesting like Benfordâs Law. But they are ALL distributions.
Stating that some event is going to happen in an undefined period of time⌠thatâs just arbitrary idle speculation. I predict that one day Microsoft will go out of business. It WILL happen⌠but when??? 5 years, 50 years, 500 years, 500,000 years??? My statement is pointless⌠like the aforementioned âLawâ.
Sorry for being so negative, but we just seem to be straying further and further away from meaningful discussions on topics that actually matter.
Maths 101âŚ
Average is a generic statistic term that could stand for: median, mode or mean.
Using these numbers; 1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 10 the values would be:
Mean - the point at which exactly halves all items. = 5
Mode - the most common item. = 10
Median - the middle point of all values. = 3.5
Median makes sense when the data is not symetrically distributed - such as house prices.
Mean makes sense when the data is symetrically distributed - such as IQ.
Mode makes sense only when you are interested in knowing the most common event.
Average commonly translates to âmeanâ (e.g. Excel), however the use of average to be âmeanâ is not a statistical convention. Statistical convention is to be explicit and not use the generic term âaverageâ on its own.
Stating that âmostâ of programmers are âbelow averageâ would indicate that average translates to âmedianâ or âmodeâ (probably median). Which doesnât match convention, but is perfectly acceptable.
Just remember - half of all people you meet are below average.
Saying all programming will be xyz is always the kind of comment that makes people look as fools do.
The internet in general hasnât created idiots, itâs just given them a voice, and thus more noticeable. This domain of the loser is no longer constrained to their basement bedroom of their parents house.
âSocial Networkingâ is the downfall of us all, but then again, itâs all chattering monkeys really want anyways.
âStating that âmostâ of programmers are âbelow averageâ would indicate that average translates to âmedianâ or âmodeâ (probably median). Which doesnât match convention, but is perfectly acceptable.â
Actually, that would seem to imply that average is being used as mean, as if it were median (like I compared it to and what the other poster seemed to believe it implied), then you would have the same number of programmers below as above average. Using it with âmost are belowâ implies mean.
I work with (and have great respect for) some really sharp ASP.NET developers. Most of my work has been developing back-end services and databases but Iâve done some ASP.NET development. I appreciate the power and accessibility (not to mention the ease-of-deployment) of web apps, but it is a major source of frustration that web development requires spending TONS of time dealing with âwhy wonât my UI render propery in version y of browser x?â problems. I guess Iâd rather spend my time and brainpower solving more interesting problems. I guess Iâm a Luddite - Iâm hoping I can eek out a living for another 15 years without having to do too much Web UI work.
âSo when will I be able to write an interactive 3D application that runs inside all of the popular browsers without any special plug-ins?â
Funny you should ask, since that is exactly what Iâm doing right now for the company I work for. Using current technology itâs obviously slow, hacky and quite inefficient in many many ways, but non of that matters since it is good enough for what we need it for and the advantages of a web app outweigh the disadvantages in this particular scenario. It will obviously not replace our desktop app (yet), but makes a very good complement in certain cases.
Realistically Iâd guess that in 2-3 years time 3D on the web will be quite usable.
Youâre right. Maybe I should take Maths 101 again.
That final statement was wrong and should read:
Stating that âmostâ of programmers are âbelow averageâ would indicate that average translates to âmeanâ or âmodeâ (probably mean).
Which can only be true if there are some very exceptional programmers that tip the scales, and therefore more than half of all people are âbelow meanâ.
Because dick waving is the heart of programming. Thanks to the internet, that is. Since it is almost purely an intellectual game, unlike pretty much everything else, people will always want to claim supremacy. The smart ones figure out early on that all of this posturing is absolute rubbish.
I think this really boils down to an argument about why programmers write code. Jeff [and I] clearly do it so other people can garner enjoyment, save time/cash/resources, or both based on our work and expertise. Mr. Braude clearly works for other reasons, be they self-aggrandizing or merely intellectual.
It takes all kinds. Someone has to write those apps which make the web work (apache, rails, php, database drivers, etc) before we can start âweb programmingâ. Maybe Mr. Braude could use his clearly superior brain to develop an un-klugified web language where we donât have to mix business logic and presentation quite so much as quite a few of the modern ones.
I think this really boils down to an argument about why programmers write code. Jeff [and I] clearly do it so other people can garner enjoyment, save time/cash/resources, or both based on our work and expertise. Mr. Braude clearly works for other reasons, be they self-aggrandizing or merely intellectual.
It takes all kinds. Someone has to write those apps which make the web work (apache, rails, php, database drivers, etc) before we can start âweb programmingâ. Maybe Mr. Braude could use his clearly superior brain to develop an un-klugified web language where we donât have to mix business logic and presentation quite so much as quite a few of the modern ones.
Putting up a web page != web application development. Mr. Baude is welcome to come sit at my desk and watch me work any day. Maybe once he actually learned about what he is denigrating he would have a different opinion.
All programming will NEVER be web programming. âWeb programmingâ wouldnât exist without desktop/hardware programming:
Is the OS web? No.
Is the IDE web? No.
Is the database server software web? No.
Device drivers? No.
Server side processes to support a web app? No.
The only thing âwebâ about web programming is the browser and the stream of data sent to it from the server. The majority of the elements of âweb programmingâ have nothing to do with âthe webâ at all.
A more accurate statement would be âmost of commonly-thought-of web programming is not web programming at all.â
Michael Braude article was so stupid that I wonder if Microsoft had it series of lay-offs just as an excuse to get rid of specific persons- Braude still works there. He was wrong on so many levels. You make software because you need to and not because you want to avoid headaches. Having different browsers to contend with is no excuse not to do web development. Do desktop developers worry about view state, post back, query string, CSS and other web-specific technologies? Experienced web developer do know things like like threading, OOP and other Braude implied they are too dumb to pick up. Software developer has its beauty and its headaches and it about what you need, not what you want to avoid. I wonder what Jeff was thinking when he decided to quote an idiot. Jeff sounded smarter than that when I heard him speak on Hanselminutes.
âPretty soon, all programming will be web programming.â - I donât think so, because in future there wonât be a separation between a desktop programming and Web programming
RockMelt will change all this. You will boot into the brwoser and there will not be a way out. No âxâ icon to close the sucker, none of that. You boot into it and you spend your life in it.
If you hold F8 during boot, you will boot into jQuery IDE. It will have compile and save button. Guess what compile does? Nothing. It is javascript hahaha. So, you save your stuff into rockmeltâs registry, boot again and off you go with testing.