Even for Adwood standards this article is really incoherent. It's also a bit of a troll. The original claim (that web developers do web development because the

Even for Adwood standards this article is really incoherent. It's also a bit of a troll. The original claim (that web developers do web development because they're too dumb to do real programming) is of course silly. However, building web apps is to a large extend about memorizing quirks, testing code in a dozen different browsers and dealing with broken libraries and lousy debuggers. Maybe 2% of the time you deal with interesting problems, the other 98% of the time you're dealing with mundane problems. Not exactly intellectually challenging. I think that to a large extend web applications are all about interface, and interface programming is almost inherently mundane. After you've worked out how everything is supposed to work on a whiteboard the rest is "just the implementation". If you're working on desktop applications, it's very different, because the interface is mostly composed of standard controls. Back in the 80ies every console application designed its own ascii interface. Arrow key navigation? Let's build that from scratch! Essentially, web development is in the same stage. Most of the JS code is mundane boilerplate. jQuery/prototype is a leap in the right direction, but we're still in the middle ages here. On the desktop it's different. MS Paint? Algorithms, and lots of them! Memory management. Flicker free drawing. Bézier-approximations for line drawings. MS-paint, which is a relatively trivial desktop app, has more interesting problems than blog engines, CMS engines, hackernews (the app), photo sharing sites and so on. Other apps I have open right now? VMWare. PDF reader. Text editors. IM client. Browsers. Putty. All these apps had to solve a lot of interesting problems. With web development you don't get to design your application (your web framework connects a method to an url), you don't get to pick an architecture (MVC is always the right solution), there are no algorithms to develop, there is no memory to manage, there is no state space to design. Web development is about giving people what they want. People want inane things, and the web is the best medium to deliver this inanity. Good business? Occasionally. Difficult computer science? Hardly.