“The reason most people want to program for the web is that they’re not smart enough to do anything else.”
lol
Pretty sure the guys who wrote GMail and Google Maps are smart.
The web is like anything else. You can write a bunch of crap for it, or you can write something truly groundbreaking.
Addition to my previous post:
Imagine if the languages of mathematics had as much rigour and inner consistency as these web programming languages. We would never have as much understanding of maths now if we couldn’t perform even simple algebra, and the only reason we can perform algebra is because the language is rigid, objective, and unambiguous.
Apply the same reasoning to these languages and you’ll see that we have no chance in hell of producing a practical algebra of computing languages.
The UI shown in web pages is just a tiny portion of what is needed to code a web application. The back-end can still be a huge part of the software and people who hate doing Web won’t even touch anything related to the Web if they just want to work on the back-end.
The UI can be a small portion, but it can still require strong coding and/or engineering skills. Some apps are easier to do, some can be complex.
Mr. Braude probably just hates doing Web UI stuff and hates that people with little experience can do things that are more popular than whatever he works on (disclaimer: I have no idea who he is or what he does).
Plus, you can still be a good programer in web apps. The difference isn’t between desk or web apps its between juste a good and clean programer and a lazy code sucker!
Sometimes you say the silliest (aka, dumbest) things, Jeff. Normally I can appreciate your viewpoints even when you tend to spout out your ideas as if they were facts (as always, I get a chuckle when you reference yourself to backup your arguments) . But the drivel on this post, and the ludicrous “Atwood’s Law” is way over the top, even for you.
I can’t even give you the advice to “step back a second and take a look around you”. Its clear from your comments that you only surround yourself with like-minded people because only then can statements like “Pretty soon, all programming will be web programming” have even a mustard seed of plausibility.
While the person you were blasting said some obviously dumb things I thought it was clear he was venting. Some of the things you quoted from him are true (it does take less know-how to create a web page than it does to write a device driver, for example). But in your tirade to discredit him you’ve done little more than show how petty you can be and, quite frankly, how ignorant you are of the programming community in the whole.
Try relaxing, take a chill pill, and try not to lash out at everything you don’t understand.
“So when will I be able to write an interactive 3D application that runs inside all of the popular browsers without any special plug-ins?”
There’s always the canvas tag, although flash is pretty universal.
http://my.opera.com/WebApplications/blog/show.dml/261474
http://www.benjoffe.com/code/demos/canvascape/textures
Basic web programming (putting some divs and forms together) isn’t challenging at all. But look at all the big websites: they don’t consist only of that. There are many mathematical problems such stream processing to compute upcoming trends, recommendation engines, etc. involved (read “Programming Collective Intelligence”). Making the architecture of a big webapp is anything else than easy. Making a framework for webapps is anything else than easy. There are just so many things that are not easy in web programming. Creating the frontend is just the tip of the iceberg. And in the course of many new web technologies evolving, things aren’t getting easier.
I agree that developing simple web sites doesn’t look challenging, but there’s still a place to grow - developing content management systems, I’m doing it for the last 3 years, and I cannot say that that’s not challenging.
I worked on an IT company with a lot of low level guys working on web application because they didn’t know how to do other things.
I think that some part of the Michael Braude quote are saying the right thing, but if lot of people write bad web code this doesn’t mean that programming on the web is bad.
The reason most people want to program in C, C++ or Java is that they’re not smart enough to do anything else. They don’t understand assemblers, registers or hexadecimal. They haven’t got a clue why you would use loop unrolling or bitshifting.
– MV
Michael Braude is correct. Web programming is retarded shit and web apps suck.
Huzzah! I work on both Application and Web materials and, while I enjoy App development, there’s simply no feeling in the world like having someone look at and appreciate your work, so I’m very much enjoying the web programming, too.
Jeff,
When quoting someone else’s article, is it possible to indicate where cuts have made?
I appreciate people can click through to read the original article, but it would be helpful if the presentation here made any editing clear. I found the omission of the paragraph starting “OK, so that’s not an entirely fair accusation to make…” made Michael’s article sound more one-sided than it is.
My apologies if this has been mentioned before.
@Jeff thanks for this, man. I don’t see why web-dev’s are seen as being less ‘serious’ than ‘traditional’ programmers. I do, and have done, most of the things Mr. Braude describes. Hell, you can even do many of them with PHP!
@Beth S It’s coming. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O3d is an example of a - admittedly still a plugin - project of Google’s. People want 3d in the browser and it will eventually be browser-native. See: Attwood’s Law.
OK. So realising how often your headlines are just link bait and are not to be taken literally, I had to read this entire post to find at the end
“Pretty soon, all programming will be web programming. If you don’t think that’s a cause for celebration for the average working programmer, then maybe you should find another profession.”
You really are saying that all programming will be web programming? All programming? Software in planes, cars, watches, fire alarms, fridges, phones, etc, all running on the web? Or do you mean that embedded programming is not real programming?
By the way, if this is true, when will all browsers be running on the web?
Niche? Web programming for the masses is the niche. MOST software projects are not written to be used by millions of people. They are written for those “niches” you speak of. It’s the software that reads a sensor and lifts a railroad drawbridge. It’s the daemon that processes millions of payments in the middle of the night in a server room hidden away and is only accessible by command-line. It’s an HMI interface 400 feet up in an industrial crane lifting 40-foot containers off a container ship. It’s the daemon that tracks products walking out of a store that haven’t been paid for. It’s the java component that activates that little buzzer telling you your table is ready at your favorite fancy restaurant. Where is the web in all of that? Huh? Where? The web is the niche.
Isn’t simple and boring the knobs and wheel and cranks of a car? This is an INVERSION OF CONTROL taking place in computing. The web is simple because people wants it to be simple, as they like the car controls to be simple. The ball is now in our roof.
Is this a problem or a challenge? I think that in BMW or Mercedes it’s a challenge to create the best driving experiences with the minimal “user interface”. Aren’t they engineers? Aren’t engineers the people who create/designed/implemented your computer because it’s simple? What about the Ipod?
Except when it is embedded programming - like say, the MAC/PHY layer of a wifi device.
Jeez, I wonder why one of the largest tech companies of our era (Google) continues purchasing large quantities of fiber. I wonder if that has anything to do with Cloud OS, I mean *Chrome OS…
Yeah… desktop applications are here to stay…
/sarcasm
If you aren’t aware of your surroundings and can’t see what’s coming, why read and participate in industry blogs?
“Pretty soon, all programming will be web programming.”
Not too sure about that… I think pretty soon all programming will be NETWORK programing, but I don’t think it’ll be all WEB programming. The web allows some pretty cool things, but it has it’s faults and some of them exclude certain aspects of coding.
I am pretty sure that sometime soon, every app will be “network ready” (as it were), and may well interface with the web - but that doesn’t make it web programming.