5 ms·

All Programming is Web Programming

115 points by DanielRibeiro 15y ago

Confusion 15y ago
All programming is web programming, as much as all industry is consumer goods industry.
CPlatypus 15y ago
What Jeff apparently meant was that all application programming is web programming. Because of this unstated (and absurd) assumption, Jeff's critique fails to address most of Michael's points - whether you agree with those points or not. By completely ignoring the system-programmer perspective, Jeff actually manages to be more insulting and apparently clueless than Michael was.
- drivingmenuts 15y ago
  Someone has managed to necro a two-year old argument. What we said two years ago may not be the same as what we say now.
  - nathanb 15y ago
    He was making a prediction about the future. A prediction which was provably wrong in 2009 and has become even more wrong today. If there's no accountability--if we don't look back on the things we write about the future and learn from them--we will not grow and will continue making inane predictions.
- ceol 15y ago
  >Because of this unstated (and absurd) assumption, Jeff's critique fails to address most of Michael's points - whether you agree with those points or not. Michael only had two points: web programming sucks, and web programmers suck. Jeff dismissed the latter in favor of tackling the former, and I think he did rather well. I could see designers— instead of paying $500 for Photoshop— pay $15/mo to use an online editing service that stores and backs up their photos for them (or syncs with Dropbox). I could see programmers paying a monthly fee to use an online IDE that builds and runs their software against an array of OSes and supports GitHub/Bitbucket. Users are already throwing their music to "the cloud" with services like Grooveshark and Pandora. These are the kind of things Jeff was talking about: as the web becomes more popular, and the cost of processing power and storage continues to fall, many things we consider too heavy for the web will start to leak in. At least, that was my take on it.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
cq 15y ago
I don't particularly care for either argument, it just seems like pointless pandering to different fan bases. Applications will evolve towards any platform as necessary
- billpatrianakos 15y ago
  Agreed. Comes off as biased fanboy-ism. It's easy to knock web programming because of how low the barrier to entry is and how any idiot who knows msqli_connect and a few simple HTML tags usually starts calling themselves a programmer. But really it takes just as much knowledge and expertise to be a "web guy". Just understanding how the client browser interacts with the server, the server to each of its components (the server software, database software, etc.) and the myriad of languages that need to interact to form a useful web app can be just as complex as writing software and understanding compilers, interfaces, classes, objects, methods, etc. I don't like how the argument devolves into "this stuff I do is complicated so I'm smarter and your stuff is simple so you're dumb". I'm a "web guy" and I had a programmer call me yesterday to help him with a simple Wordpress upgrade, SSL certificate, and an upgrade to phpMyAdmin. Software can be easy or hard just like web apps. I think maybe the big difference is that web apps can get wider exposure more easily than desktop software as all you need is a browser to run it so they're just more visible. There are plenty of crappy desktop software apps and I make them all the time when I play with C++.
  - nathanb 15y ago
    Indeed. I (a systems programmer) can write web code just as well as a good web programmer can write systems code: badly. That web frameworks and infrastructure tend to be more forgiving than bare hardware and system architecture is likely why the stereotype of the incompetent web programmer has come about, but the quality of a good web programmer is roughly equivalent to the quality of a good mobile developer or a good systems programmer or a good desktop application programmer.
    - jff 15y ago
      If your web application is broken: something looks wrong, hit refresh. If your kernel code is broken: kernel dumps stack, panics, and reboots. Those lucky web guys :)
mcknz 15y ago
How about adding [2009] to the title? If I see a popular blog on HN I assume it's at least the current year. I probably wouldn't click through to an old Atwood post.
- __Joker 15y ago
  Never made this comment, but it would be great to add this to posting guidelines about posting old stuff. Sigh, I feel old.
zubr1768 15y ago
I would expect such a brilliant, intelligent and real programmer to write something better than that...
- botj 15y ago
  Was that a joke about Michael or Jeff? I can't tell.
thedangler 15y ago
Seems like everything is moving in the path of least resistance.
Abdul321 15y ago
That's expected from someone who does not know C. Not all programming is gluing stuff together..
- georgieporgie 15y ago
  Eh? What's special about C that means you don't glue things together? I'm pretty sure I've glued things together in C before...
  - feralchimp 15y ago
    I think his meaning was "exclusively" gluing things together.
    - dasil003 15y ago
      And where do you draw the line?
  - alecbenzer 15y ago
    I don't think it's anything about C per-se but more about how most people use C (etc).
georgieporgie 15y ago
All of the arguments that state some variant of, "X results in better programs, because X programmers are better, because X is hard," are ridiculous. Getting software done is more about stubbornness and drive than it is about intelligence. I've known a number of very slow, irrational people who were extremely set on goals, and I've known even more brilliant people who could rarely see anything through to completion.
LuxuryMode 15y ago
LOL. That dude's comments are hilarious. As someone with a lot of experience in mobile (Java/Objective-C) I couldn't believe he said web development is easy. I am just learning web stuff now and I find to be very challenging and exciting.
aklofas 15y ago
Hmm. I would have to disagree with Atwood. Most software development is still on the desktop. That is to say, there is still a very, very large sector of chip designers, robotics, medical devices, embedded systems, aircraft/spacecraft/cars/etc., OSes, hand-held gadgets, blah blah blah that all write non-javascript, non-ruby stuff. This website seems to be focused around the startup-website culture, so maybe this isn't the best crowd to reality-check. Sometimes a different perspective is useful, though. As for Atwoods Law, that's pretty ridiculous.
johnnyn 15y ago
"Atwood's Law: any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript." Nice! Nodejs is very much proving this theory to be correct.
adrusi 15y ago
The author fails to realize that not all programming is either web programming or desktop software programming. This is just a subset of programming: software development. It's reasonable to assume that all software development will one day be web programming since a web app is much more accessible than its desktop equivalent. (I personally hope that this is not the case, because with web apps customers pay a regular fee for the server resources they use rather than a one time payment for the program itself; web apps are more expensive for users) But software development is far from being the majority of programming, most programs are written by people from mathematical and science fields. Since these aren't distributed, it's easy to forget that they even exist. These academic programs are frequently replicated many times by other organizations because if one lab publishes the results of a new study, other labs will want to verify them, and they're not going to use the same code, that would hardly be a thorough verification. But I don't think that even all software development will become web development. I wasn't round back then, but I'm guessing that people said the same thing about command line programs becoming GUI programs back when GUIs came out, and yet I use vim, tmux, git, countless REPLS and many other command line programs.
- fleitz 15y ago
  Are they more expensive? What is the cost in time of supporting a desktop app? What is the cost of losing all your data because you failed to put in place a backup solution? What is the cost of having inaccessible data because it's silo'd on a desktop somewhere? People don't pay for the server resources, they pay for the value added by packaging a piece of software together with hardware and providing support services (sys admins, devops, etc) to keep that infrastructure running 24/7. They also pay for the expertise that keeps that company with great engineers instead of mediocre ones. Server infrastructure is simply the most identifiable cost to a developer, but is not at all what people pay for. They pay for peace of mind knowing that really qualified people are managing their infrastructure and that they don't have to worry about it so they can focus on more important tasks like running their lives and businesses. If you value your time SaaS is generally a great deal (especially if you're not extremely knowledgable about IT/IS). Same thing with the app store, you're not paying for the infrastructure, you're paying to access a market segment where people open their wallets to buy shiny things and are willing to pay more for quality.
hugh3 15y ago
As I sit here, waiting for a few thousand CPUs on the astronomy department's cluster to free up so I can run my code, I say "hah!"
- nikcub 15y ago
  poor analysis like this makes the mistake of observing ones own environment and then extrapolating it to the whole world.
  - mturmon 15y ago
    It would be wiser to say this about the OP, which looks around nearby and proclaims "All programming is web programming".
    - nikcub 15y ago
      I was referring to the OP :) I realize now that my comment may not have come across properly since I replied to a nice rebuttal to OP
karolist 15y ago
I suppose this is here only because it was mentioned in the comments on HN somewhere today. I'm finding it odd whenever I see such "targeted" content, like the articles on swearing. Or when I read a comment and suddenly there's a blog post in the front page talking about the same thing, but not mentioning the comment it self. Some people put too much value in this karma thing I suppose.
fleitz 15y ago
The marketplace decides these things not esoteric arguments about polymorphic inheritance. What probably pisses the debater about "web programmers" is that they can make huge fortunes from these things where as most "systems programmers" do not. For the most part no one who writes cheques cares that someone decreased the cycle count a context switch. It's a poor value prop. The outlier in this axis is HFT where someone might care and the programmers fully understand and communicate the value they create. Yes, someone can position faster context switches as something they care about and the person who does that will get cut a cheque, and that's basically what "web programmers" do. We market the incredibly difficult work of "systems programmers". The closer to the metal you are the further you are down the food chain. Is Linux harder to program than early incantations of Facebook? Probably. Is Zuck going to make more money from his PHP webapp than Linus from will from his C Kernel? Probably.
eulerfx 15y ago
There is truth to the original argument by Michael Braude if viewed from the intended perspective. The problem is that the intended perspective is very narrow and is in fact outlined in its entirety in the statement itself. (The web guys he is referring to are not all web guys, just the ones who don't understand his tenacious albeit very basic list of programming techniques, and more importantly the ones who copy and paste all their code from MSDN tutorials). You add a little bit of resentment and pride into the mix and this is what you get.

115 points by DanielRibeiro 15y ago

All programming is web programming, as much as all industry is consumer goods industry.

What Jeff apparently meant was that all application programming is web programming. Because of this unstated (and absurd) assumption, Jeff's critique fails to address most of Michael's points - whether you agree with those points or not. By completely ignoring the system-programmer perspective, Jeff actually manages to be more insulting and apparently clueless than Michael was.

drivingmenuts 15y ago
Someone has managed to necro a two-year old argument. What we said two years ago may not be the same as what we say now.
- nathanb 15y ago
  He was making a prediction about the future. A prediction which was provably wrong in 2009 and has become even more wrong today. If there's no accountability--if we don't look back on the things we write about the future and learn from them--we will not grow and will continue making inane predictions.
ceol 15y ago
>Because of this unstated (and absurd) assumption, Jeff's critique fails to address most of Michael's points - whether you agree with those points or not. Michael only had two points: web programming sucks, and web programmers suck. Jeff dismissed the latter in favor of tackling the former, and I think he did rather well. I could see designers— instead of paying $500 for Photoshop— pay $15/mo to use an online editing service that stores and backs up their photos for them (or syncs with Dropbox). I could see programmers paying a monthly fee to use an online IDE that builds and runs their software against an array of OSes and supports GitHub/Bitbucket. Users are already throwing their music to "the cloud" with services like Grooveshark and Pandora. These are the kind of things Jeff was talking about: as the web becomes more popular, and the cost of processing power and storage continues to fall, many things we consider too heavy for the web will start to leak in. At least, that was my take on it.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

cq 15y ago

I don't particularly care for either argument, it just seems like pointless pandering to different fan bases. Applications will evolve towards any platform as necessary

billpatrianakos 15y ago
Agreed. Comes off as biased fanboy-ism. It's easy to knock web programming because of how low the barrier to entry is and how any idiot who knows msqli_connect and a few simple HTML tags usually starts calling themselves a programmer. But really it takes just as much knowledge and expertise to be a "web guy". Just understanding how the client browser interacts with the server, the server to each of its components (the server software, database software, etc.) and the myriad of languages that need to interact to form a useful web app can be just as complex as writing software and understanding compilers, interfaces, classes, objects, methods, etc. I don't like how the argument devolves into "this stuff I do is complicated so I'm smarter and your stuff is simple so you're dumb". I'm a "web guy" and I had a programmer call me yesterday to help him with a simple Wordpress upgrade, SSL certificate, and an upgrade to phpMyAdmin. Software can be easy or hard just like web apps. I think maybe the big difference is that web apps can get wider exposure more easily than desktop software as all you need is a browser to run it so they're just more visible. There are plenty of crappy desktop software apps and I make them all the time when I play with C++.
- nathanb 15y ago
  Indeed. I (a systems programmer) can write web code just as well as a good web programmer can write systems code: badly. That web frameworks and infrastructure tend to be more forgiving than bare hardware and system architecture is likely why the stereotype of the incompetent web programmer has come about, but the quality of a good web programmer is roughly equivalent to the quality of a good mobile developer or a good systems programmer or a good desktop application programmer.
  - jff 15y ago
    If your web application is broken: something looks wrong, hit refresh. If your kernel code is broken: kernel dumps stack, panics, and reboots. Those lucky web guys :)

mcknz 15y ago

How about adding [2009] to the title? If I see a popular blog on HN I assume it's at least the current year. I probably wouldn't click through to an old Atwood post.

__Joker 15y ago
Never made this comment, but it would be great to add this to posting guidelines about posting old stuff. Sigh, I feel old.

zubr1768 15y ago

I would expect such a brilliant, intelligent and real programmer to write something better than that...

botj 15y ago
Was that a joke about Michael or Jeff? I can't tell.

thedangler 15y ago

Seems like everything is moving in the path of least resistance.

Abdul321 15y ago

That's expected from someone who does not know C. Not all programming is gluing stuff together..

georgieporgie 15y ago
Eh? What's special about C that means you don't glue things together? I'm pretty sure I've glued things together in C before...
- feralchimp 15y ago
  I think his meaning was "exclusively" gluing things together.
  - dasil003 15y ago
    And where do you draw the line?
- alecbenzer 15y ago
  I don't think it's anything about C per-se but more about how most people use C (etc).

georgieporgie 15y ago

All of the arguments that state some variant of, "X results in better programs, because X programmers are better, because X is hard," are ridiculous. Getting software done is more about stubbornness and drive than it is about intelligence. I've known a number of very slow, irrational people who were extremely set on goals, and I've known even more brilliant people who could rarely see anything through to completion.

LuxuryMode 15y ago

LOL. That dude's comments are hilarious. As someone with a lot of experience in mobile (Java/Objective-C) I couldn't believe he said web development is easy. I am just learning web stuff now and I find to be very challenging and exciting.

aklofas 15y ago

Hmm. I would have to disagree with Atwood. Most software development is still on the desktop. That is to say, there is still a very, very large sector of chip designers, robotics, medical devices, embedded systems, aircraft/spacecraft/cars/etc., OSes, hand-held gadgets, blah blah blah that all write non-javascript, non-ruby stuff. This website seems to be focused around the startup-website culture, so maybe this isn't the best crowd to reality-check. Sometimes a different perspective is useful, though. As for Atwoods Law, that's pretty ridiculous.

johnnyn 15y ago

"Atwood's Law: any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript." Nice! Nodejs is very much proving this theory to be correct.

adrusi 15y ago

The author fails to realize that not all programming is either web programming or desktop software programming. This is just a subset of programming: software development. It's reasonable to assume that all software development will one day be web programming since a web app is much more accessible than its desktop equivalent. (I personally hope that this is not the case, because with web apps customers pay a regular fee for the server resources they use rather than a one time payment for the program itself; web apps are more expensive for users) But software development is far from being the majority of programming, most programs are written by people from mathematical and science fields. Since these aren't distributed, it's easy to forget that they even exist. These academic programs are frequently replicated many times by other organizations because if one lab publishes the results of a new study, other labs will want to verify them, and they're not going to use the same code, that would hardly be a thorough verification. But I don't think that even all software development will become web development. I wasn't round back then, but I'm guessing that people said the same thing about command line programs becoming GUI programs back when GUIs came out, and yet I use vim, tmux, git, countless REPLS and many other command line programs.

fleitz 15y ago
Are they more expensive? What is the cost in time of supporting a desktop app? What is the cost of losing all your data because you failed to put in place a backup solution? What is the cost of having inaccessible data because it's silo'd on a desktop somewhere? People don't pay for the server resources, they pay for the value added by packaging a piece of software together with hardware and providing support services (sys admins, devops, etc) to keep that infrastructure running 24/7. They also pay for the expertise that keeps that company with great engineers instead of mediocre ones. Server infrastructure is simply the most identifiable cost to a developer, but is not at all what people pay for. They pay for peace of mind knowing that really qualified people are managing their infrastructure and that they don't have to worry about it so they can focus on more important tasks like running their lives and businesses. If you value your time SaaS is generally a great deal (especially if you're not extremely knowledgable about IT/IS). Same thing with the app store, you're not paying for the infrastructure, you're paying to access a market segment where people open their wallets to buy shiny things and are willing to pay more for quality.

hugh3 15y ago

As I sit here, waiting for a few thousand CPUs on the astronomy department's cluster to free up so I can run my code, I say "hah!"

nikcub 15y ago
poor analysis like this makes the mistake of observing ones own environment and then extrapolating it to the whole world.
- mturmon 15y ago
  It would be wiser to say this about the OP, which looks around nearby and proclaims "All programming is web programming".
  - nikcub 15y ago
    I was referring to the OP :) I realize now that my comment may not have come across properly since I replied to a nice rebuttal to OP

karolist 15y ago

I suppose this is here only because it was mentioned in the comments on HN somewhere today. I'm finding it odd whenever I see such "targeted" content, like the articles on swearing. Or when I read a comment and suddenly there's a blog post in the front page talking about the same thing, but not mentioning the comment it self. Some people put too much value in this karma thing I suppose.

fleitz 15y ago

The marketplace decides these things not esoteric arguments about polymorphic inheritance. What probably pisses the debater about "web programmers" is that they can make huge fortunes from these things where as most "systems programmers" do not. For the most part no one who writes cheques cares that someone decreased the cycle count a context switch. It's a poor value prop. The outlier in this axis is HFT where someone might care and the programmers fully understand and communicate the value they create. Yes, someone can position faster context switches as something they care about and the person who does that will get cut a cheque, and that's basically what "web programmers" do. We market the incredibly difficult work of "systems programmers". The closer to the metal you are the further you are down the food chain. Is Linux harder to program than early incantations of Facebook? Probably. Is Zuck going to make more money from his PHP webapp than Linus from will from his C Kernel? Probably.

eulerfx 15y ago

There is truth to the original argument by Michael Braude if viewed from the intended perspective. The problem is that the intended perspective is very narrow and is in fact outlined in its entirety in the statement itself. (The web guys he is referring to are not all web guys, just the ones who don't understand his tenacious albeit very basic list of programming techniques, and more importantly the ones who copy and paste all their code from MSDN tutorials). You add a little bit of resentment and pride into the mix and this is what you get.