While talking to a certain fellow at an untold location, I heard a statement that semi-floored me. He mentioned that web programmers don’t really create systems. They do not program and design systems. They merely assemble things. My thought was that he was comparing web developers to a lego model building, direction following individual. This seems to really undercut what some, might I say phenomenal web developers do.
While web developing can at time be mere assembly of modules, often it is developing processes and dealing with some complex logic. I am not attempting to say that we are genius C++ video game programmers, however, I think we deserve some credit. We are not lego-assembling, direction following idiots.
What are your thoughts?
Well it really depends on your definition of web developer. I am one myself, and there are days when I do a lot of lego-assembling and then there are days when I pretty much only code new things.
There are of course those kind of people who only do markup, and well those shouldn’t really be called web developers anyway. More like webmasters, or webpage makers/coders.
A web developer is much more than just lego-assembling. It’s developing a project from start to end, and doing all the things that are required. Be it lego-assembling, or doing things from scratch and innovating.
As for “C++ video game programmers”, well there are only so many ways that you can draw a polygon, so in a way all they do is just assemble the needed (lego) blocks.
I think the disconnect might be between people who think web developers only use HTML (or mark-up languages in general) versus using “real” programming languages, like Perl or PHP. “Web Developer” ends up being a very broad category. Some people do develop applications on the web, which is a very tricky job because the lack of standards complicates things. On the other hand, “real programmers” have a disdainful attitude towards web folk, because for the most part you’re looking at the sort of people who Legoed something together in Dreamweaver (or, shudder, FrontPage), entirely in the WYSIWYG editor, and call themselves developers.
Of course, even the WYSIWYG folks have to think of organization of data, user interfaces, etc, and that can get quite complicated as well.
Going entirely in the opposite direction, I’d say most C++ game programmer types are just as guilty of being Lego builders. Show me one coder in the past two decades who built all their libraries from scratch. Like my CS prof used to say, programmers are inherently lazy, and will reuse and recycle whatever the can to get out of doing redundant work.
I agree, my job sees me developing pure C++ doing and I can be doing very complicated algorithms at times.
However I develop web pages in my spare time and find it just as taxing, if not more so as it taxes different skills, such as presentation, user interfaces etc.
It also tackles different optimization problems.
All in all if someone is developing something then it’s the end result you should look at not how they got there!
The entire development is migrating to web. So how to say that it deserves less credit? And if does, who are the real developers? C++/Assembly programmer? Oh god..
I totally disagree that programmers don’t create systems. This is really unfair, I have also heard that from many guys. I am working as web developer for last two years and I can say proudly that I have developed systems.
And as said by André Pena, whole development is shifting to web, so those guy will learn soon that what worth web development owns. I have worked as a software developer in UK based business automation firm. They have there two main products. Both products have web and desktop versions. Believe me that they stopped working on desktop application, and send those guys to work with us on web versions.
Let’s just leave it this: a geek is defined by his/her work be it a program, a web application, or a phenomenal xbox live rank. It’s all relativity. One can’t simply make broad judgments about a group of individuals.