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Web development is almost all "construction", which has little to do with computer science. Look it up in Code Complete. I've worked in web development for ma

by KevinMS 17y ago

Web development is almost all "construction", which has little to do with computer science. Look it up in Code Complete. I've worked in web development for many years, doing some pretty complicated stuff, and I've never needed to remember how to do a bubble sort. In other news, Ben & Jerry recommend a quart of ice cream a day.

bmj 17y ago
Agreed. And unless you are building your own framework from scratch, most of the hard problems are already solved for you. That's not to say it is necessarily trivial (though it can certainly be), but it is not, say, researching new sort methods or creating new languages. UPDATE: I suppose it could be argued that creating new languages is not computer science, either. I reckon it depends on the language itself.
megaman821 17y ago
Other than an academic exercises I have never had to write a sort in any language I have used. But know what does involve computer science, knowing what type of pre-written sort to apply to your problem based on time and memory constraints. Or knowing the performance characteristics of different key/value stores on a specific data set. Saying web development is just construction is crazy. Maybe for some brochure-ware sites it is, but not for ebay, amazon, google, etc.. It is like saying building a sky scraper is just construction, just like building a dog house.
- eru 17y ago
  Why is sorting cited as _the_ computer science problem? There's a lot to be learned about the boundaries between P and NP. For example find polynomial algorithms for linear optimization. Or it would be nice to know, if randomization --- which helps in practice [0] --- really does help in theory, too. [0] E.g. a quicksort that selects a pivot at random.
dasil003 17y ago
Not quite. Web development is more like architecture plus structural engineering plus construction, but it's not physics.
jacoblyles 17y ago
I got kind of excited when I realized I needed a semaphore in the web app I'm building. That's fun.
- eru 17y ago
  I suggest you read about Software Transactional Memory, if you like that kind of fun.

by KevinMS 17y ago

bmj 17y ago

Agreed. And unless you are building your own framework from scratch, most of the hard problems are already solved for you. That's not to say it is necessarily trivial (though it can certainly be), but it is not, say, researching new sort methods or creating new languages. UPDATE: I suppose it could be argued that creating new languages is not computer science, either. I reckon it depends on the language itself.

megaman821 17y ago

Other than an academic exercises I have never had to write a sort in any language I have used. But know what does involve computer science, knowing what type of pre-written sort to apply to your problem based on time and memory constraints. Or knowing the performance characteristics of different key/value stores on a specific data set. Saying web development is just construction is crazy. Maybe for some brochure-ware sites it is, but not for ebay, amazon, google, etc.. It is like saying building a sky scraper is just construction, just like building a dog house.

eru 17y ago
Why is sorting cited as _the_ computer science problem? There's a lot to be learned about the boundaries between P and NP. For example find polynomial algorithms for linear optimization. Or it would be nice to know, if randomization --- which helps in practice [0] --- really does help in theory, too. [0] E.g. a quicksort that selects a pivot at random.

dasil003 17y ago

Not quite. Web development is more like architecture plus structural engineering plus construction, but it's not physics.

jacoblyles 17y ago

I got kind of excited when I realized I needed a semaphore in the web app I'm building. That's fun.

eru 17y ago
I suggest you read about Software Transactional Memory, if you like that kind of fun.