When I first entered the workforce I started off doing embedded Linux programming. Device drivers, kernel hacks, small systems with limited resources, FPGAs, etc... This was difficult, and posed lots of challenges.
I ended up jumping all the way to the other end of the "stack" -- web front-ends. Webdev has been a side-hobby of a sort for quite a while, and I pretty much expected it to be a lot simpler than the low level systems programming that I've been doing.
I've been doing web client and server programming for some time now, and I can without a doubt claim that it poses its own set of challenges that compare and oftentimes exceed in complexity to those encountered in the "lower level" programming fields.
I think the entire notion that one type of programming is more "real" than others comes from lack of perspective. Once you dive deep into more than one development layer, use case, architecture, language, or community, you realize that the challenges each one faces are as varied, unique, and interesting as the rest of them.
I've done most of the spectrum from Perl webdev to chip design, with a good chunk of embedded C and C++ in the middle. I basically agree, and I think there's roughly these types of challenge:
- Complicated business requirements ("do this every second Tuesday if there is an R in the month, but not if the customer is using the US VAT system and not if the product is a type of cake")
- Critical system requirements (remember, using Java to control your nuclear reactor violates the license). People working in this environment can easily get elitist about it, until you look at their code and find Toyota spaghetti.
- Problems that require Actual Maths or Actual CS, with known solutions. Rare in the webdev world until someone remembers about ACID; more common in the embedded world if you need control systems.
- Problems with unknown solutions. Actually extremely rare; often the first line of attack involves Matlab or Excel or some other "not real programming" technique. Often the smart domain experts you need to solve the problem are not also very good at software engineering.
IME the first two take up 80-90% of the working day. The third is only applicable to some industries.
Different people are better at different types of challenge. This doesn't matter unless you're trying to construct some sort of total ordering over human beings in order to feel better about yourself.
> - Complicated business requirements ("do this every second Tuesday if there is an R in the month, but not if the customer is using the US VAT system and not if the product is a type of cake")
And then you realise there's no consistent definition of "cake" in the system. And when people in the business say "US VAT system" they actually mean "Regulatory system XYZ", not actually anything to do with the US.
Plus the requirement is not neatly in one place ("do X every Y except if Z"), but strewn all over a document (or several), and different requirements contradicting each other, with no priority defined.
Funny. Most of my career was about problems with no known solutions. I wonder why people keep calling them "rare". After all, why even bother solving a solved problen?
And yes, most useful prototyping tools for me were far from C++ and alike - I used Maxima, Mathematica, various Lisps with tons of batteries. Also not a "real programming".
#1 Just because you're constantly tackling interesting problems doesn't mean they're super common. Most of us seem to be working on an application meeting some trivial business need.
#2 Just because you don't know the answer doesn't mean the answer doesn't exist. The world of development is filled with 20 somethings getting paid huge sums of money to learn and deliver something completely alike to all the other things they think are really different.
You probably fit into one of these categories, if it's the first then congrats, because that sounds like an interesting life.
I still cannot understand what justifies re-solving a solved problem over and over again? Solved once? Automate it.
> Most of us seem to be working on an application meeting some trivial business need.
OP says it's somehow "not trivial". For some weird reasons.
Anyway, if the workflow is trivial, if required components are standard, if no customisation is required - it does not need any engineering at all. List those initial requirements, infer the implementation automatically. It is hard to comprehend why the CRUD world is so reluctant to do such an easy thing.
> doesn't mean the answer doesn't exist
It may exist in some highly secretive labs, but in most cases it cannot be found in any of the papers or preprints.
So just because something is trivial doesn't mean that it doesn't require time to implement the rules. You can be entering a bunch of convulted rules into a GUI based system or you can be writing them in code.
I largely actually prefer the code way, believing it's much more flexible, sane and safer. However, the problem is the average person who understands these rules is scared of the code, and the average coder is much more interested in solving a lot of inconsequential problems.
This makes it much harder to pay someone in who's just going to sit down and churn out your CRUD and when folks find these guys, they're either keeping them happy or think they're easily replaceable and will have a fall later on.
I'm doing devops at a big org at the moment. They have several dev teams working on bespoke low-traffic resource managment applications. Most of these have 5 developers, devops, delivery manager, user researcher, designer in addition of going view a technical review process, pen testing, performance review, and functional testing.
Basic math suggests that's going to come out at about £350,000 per project over 3 months. A million quid later, they've all passed reviews without any of these so called highly technical people realising they're dealing with a common problem and that they're developing 3 of them. Also they're all shit because they're done by MEAN stack tech hipsters who haven't quite realise they're leaking important data.
> You can be entering a bunch of convulted rules into a GUI based system or you can be writing them in code.
There are more options than just these two. The best way is to write your rules in a nice, readable, dense DSL, designed specifically for that domain experts who know the rules but are afraid of code. And such a DSL can be very much free form and forgiving, helping a lot along the way, so the experts won't need much assistance.
With such an approach, developers (i.e., those who are not afraid of code) are either not needed or only concerned with maintaining this DSL, while the experts can code their rules directly. It eliminates unnecessary elements of a chain, and cuts costs quite significantly.
> It is hard to comprehend why the CRUD world is so reluctant to do such an easy thing.
It is odd, isn't it? I'm tempted to say if you think it's so easy, go forth and do it: automating away the production of CRUD would earn you billions. SAP is probably the nearest existing product. But every attempt so far just creates a different group of developers (e.g. SAP).
In a sane and rational world - yes, it would have been automated. But in our world everything is done the most twisted way possible, either deliberately or out of some deeply ingrained human stupidity.
I cannot stop shaking every time I interact with pretty much anything designed by supposedly high profile specialists. There is no single day I do not run into an astonishing stupidity. Daily commute? London Oyster system is such a thoroughly shitty design that it is nearly unbelievable. Shopping? It never works as one would expect, and is always far too twisted - all that Amazons, Ebays and alike. Healthcare? Just super stupid, stupider than the trashier of the comedies. Yes, they "automate". They decided that a doctor should not type or write, to save a valuable time. They're expected to record everything on a voice recorder and pass it to an assistant for typing. Guess what? They type or write first, because it's easier, and then read it aloud. Shall I go on?
This world is a pile of stupid shit, throughout. And expecting that something that definitely should have been automated or eliminated altogether would have happened is just totally naive.
And if someone really do automate all the CRUD needs for 80% of the possible users, they'd never know anything about it. So why bother? They must grow up and automate it themselves, it's dead easy.
If you are specific enough then most problems have no known solutions. I work for government and we see a lot of solutions that solve most of our problems but there is always a catch. That cool cloud stuff? Can't use it. The problem in reality is we need a solution for X that also satisfies our privacy and security policy. From this perspective there is no known solution. We have to develop our own solution.
This makes sense for embedded: you want to save every penny since it's a high volume business, the chip manufacturer wants to save every penny , there's a huge amount of variety in chips - so in the end development is hard. Without all those requirements, heck maybe something like the arduino/mbed would have become popular among professionals.
But as for webdev ? not so much. The critical factors are time-to-market and development cost. And in the domain of web based business apps, we already have useful high-level tools[1], and it seems to be technically possible to improve the situation in consumer facing apps too.
For webdev, the biggest inadequate tool is the browser itself: ancient versions, vendor quirks, mandatory single language. This is mostly due to it being the place where various competing interests have fought one another to a standstill.
But a good, high level tool solves/abstracts all those issues for it's developers(with the cost of some performance decrease) . The business oriented tools manage to do so.
You hit the nail on the head with the Actual CS problems. Storing data is probably the only complex area of web deevelopment, but it's something that 90% of developers seem to punt on.
Really, there is nothing wrong with being a "PHP Programmer," or even a WordPress "programmer," if you can find people to pay you for it. Well done, that counts as succeeding in life.
On the other hand, if someone has spent years feeling bad that they don't know lower-level programming, they need to get over themselves and spend a few weekends learning assembly or something. There's no reason to feel bad about this, take a bit of time to expel your ignorance.
Completely agree, I'm currently a PHP programmer (and quite a lot of Python and JS and some other stuff).
I grew up programming and had my BASIC, Pascal, C++, Delphi and C# phases, I like web development (generally, the tooling sometimes sucks but as a platform you have global reach), I'm also well past the point where I worry about "real" programming or whether I'm a "real" programmer - I can solve any problem I run into by research or buying a good book, there are domains I'm completely oblivious too (for example 3D programming and quite a lot of the machine learning stuff).
The systems I build solve problems and provide value, that value might be in making someones life easier (which is what my current side project will do) or automating a business process (my favourite was an engineer management system I built for a small company a few years ago, they've now grown to ~20 engineers and are still using it, they've filed 3 bugs in 3 years - literally the best work I ever did and at the time I thought it was average).
Programming is such a vast field and there is more out there than you could learn deeply in a life time so I try to stay abreast of what's going on by watching conferences online and not worry too much about measuring my e-peen. (latest one is Code Mesh https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWbHc_FXPo2jB6IZ887vL... which has some stunning stuff).
If I have a particular strength it's that I enjoy the process of meshing what the client thinks they need with what they actually need and finding the intersect, often clients don't realise what they can gain from software and the simple business suggestions can be huge, I wrote a system for a company that used NCR pads they had to get custom printed, this required the field engineers to keep the pads in stock, they where filling them out by hand for every job and it was expensive and error prone, I suggested instead that we generate the PDF's with everything prefilled in and duplicate pages which are sent to the engineers by email, they can get them printed wherever they are either on site at the clients or any place that does print from disk, this saved them a lot of money, it hadn't occurred to the client that this was possible - so now they assign jobs to an engineer, the system generates all the paperwork for that week and they just require a signature from the client who keeps one copy while they keep the other.
> I've been doing web client and server programming for some time now, and I can without a doubt claim that it poses its own set of challenges that compare and oftentimes exceed in complexity to those encountered in the "lower level" programming fields.
I'm a math major turned 'full stack' dev with an eye on embedded dev as my prize- I needed this comment.
It's extremely true. I occasionally joke about how web programming isn't really programming, but it really is nothing but a joke.
Making a LED blink on a microcontroller is just about as difficult as showing an intermittent alert in a browser window. It may seem harder because you need to know a little more about the abstraction layers underneath, but those are things that you can pick up just as quickly as JavaScript.
Designing a high-throughput data interface system in FPGA (which I'm doing now) is at least as hard as doing a high-throughput back-end infrastructure for a web service. I can barely do the former -- I sure as fuck can't do the latter right now, regardless of how "real" my programming skills are. When I read through a paper on the latter topic, or watch a presentation, I can mostly understand what it's about and appreciate the technical prowess, but doing something like that myself would likely be a quick lesson in humility.
If you like what you're doing and you're creating programs that do useful, or at least spectacular things, you're a real programmer.
The difference is that with microcontrollers, what you see is what you get. The API is defined by the hardware, and most of the time you're just poking numbers into registers. There's nowhere else to go.
With web programming a lot of the difficulty is self-inflicted by the industry. To get a web page up you need to know at least two different abstractions (HTML and CSS) which aren't clean or well-designed and have more warts than a skin care clinic.
Then, to fix their limitations you need to use js.
Then, because there's a lot of repetition in web dev, you have to use a handful of js frameworks, which currently outnumber the stars in the universe, and each has a production half-life of around six months.
And then there's the server side.
And if you get all of that working you have to run at scale, with adequate security.
And can we have it in green and make the logo bigger?
So of course it's hard. It's like being trapped in a novel by Kafka written in XML.
> The difference is that with microcontrollers, what you see is what you get. The API is defined by the hardware, and most of the time you're just poking numbers into registers. There's nowhere else to go.
No it's not. In real life, it's fairly rare to write 100% bare-metal applications, and even when you do, you're often writing against some "homegrown" abstraction layer. Sometimes you're expected to write such an abstraction layer, but writing only against the hardware-defined "API" is usually not strategically sound, unless you have a very good reason to assume that the underlying hardware will never change. This is sometimes true for very resource-constrained microcontrollers, and virtually always true for things that have ARM in their name and stronger. Not to mention for embedded, but relatively high-power devices (see e.g. the Linux kernel).
Sure, the drivers are hardware-specific, but the applications are usually programmed against their (unitary) interface.
I'm not arguing against the rest of what you mention -- I'm painfully disappointed by the neverending spaghetti of technologies that modern web is, and I also think it's largely self-inflicted. However, web dev is treated as much more of a commodity than other branches of programming; left to their own devices, there are a lot of web developers who would produce very good client-side code.
Shit like bootstrap isn't there because web developers are incompetent. It's there because much of their job involves churning out support code for products managed by people who know nothing about technology and the WWW, whose quality standards are dubious at best and who value product conformance over performance because they sell perception, not quality.
Just admit it. Most of the challenges in the frontend development are only there because of a horrible overengineering of this entire stack. It was supposed to be easy.
The Web is a full-spectrum application delivery mechanism that allows for completely untrusted, actively malicious programs to be run, and it evolved from a mechanism to display static documents. Of course it's going to be strangely designed.
Given those requirements, your only choices are Java Sandboxed Apps, Flash and the Web. Which would you choose?
> and it evolved from a mechanism to display static documents
It evolved from a deliberately dumbed-down mechanism. Much more sane options existed back than, but for reasons unknown (laziness is quite likely) a choice of a technological foundation was very much random.
I do remember web from its very first days (used to work in an institute with some very tight connections with CERN), and even then I was wondering why such a good idea is going such a non-optimal way.
And, well, it was not quite "evolved", it followed the trends set exactly by this lot - by the web devs. So I cannot see who else should I blame for this mess.
> Which would you choose?
If I had a choice, it would have been Tcl/Tk in a sandbox.
Agreed. I've done over 10 years in both embedded programming and full-stack web, and I often wish for the simplicity of embedded programming.
Of course, embedded programming has gotten a lot more complicated too. When I started, we had to fit our programs into 4K of ROM. These days an embedded program often includes a full Linux stack.
When I'm engaged in rapid prototyping or testing an idea, I almost exclusively rely on the stack I'm familiar with that fits the problem domain. But I don't consider that "real code" given the very nature of what I'm doing and the understanding that once the problem has a solution, that solution can be applied to whatever stack BEST fits the situation.
The author seems to engage in the same behavior, but conflates the "get things done fast" with the production solution.
If you're a good programmer and your preferred tool is PHP, then you're engaged in "real programming." If you insist on using PHP as a deployment solution because it's what you're familiar with rather than because it is an appropriate/optimal solution to the problem then you're engaged in laziness.
A good programmer can adapt their mental models and adopt the tools necessary for the problem domain. A bad one always has an excuse for why their comfort justifies tool choice.
Yes, if PHP is appropriate to the task at hand AND you have an existing set of PHP talent in-house then it would be hard to argue that isn't an optimal solution.
However, if PHP is not appropriate, that in-house PHP talent does not change the fact that PHP is the wrong tool.
If your in house 'talent' can't learn a new web framework without too much trouble, then it's questionable to call it talent.
I've never worked at a company that used Delphi, but I have complete confidence in my ability to use the language. If a person doesn't feel confident in their ability to pick up C, they are missing something from their toolkit.
This hits home for me. I started web development in PHP, went up and down the ladder a lot, but still continue to do PHP (Mostly Laravel these days). However, I am fascinated by the web in general and all the abstractions that make it stand up. More specifically, things like REST, HTTP, sessions, and all the web APIs that you consider for granted on the browser. Even things like CORS.
The nice thing about PHP is that it lets you play with these abstractions _even when you are starting out_. For eg, a redirect in ruby/sinatra would be `redirect https://google.com`, but stock PHP would want you to use the header("Location: https://google.com"); variant[0]. PHP doesn't abstract out the web, but lets you build on top of it. Its close enough to C so you know what is happening and how things are working (or atleast its easier to figure out), and still dynamic enough to get shit done.
There are problems with PHP's design, sure. But these are getting fewer and fewer with things like PHP7/Composer and the entire ecosystem still evolving. And believe it or not: there are problems with _every programming language_. Just pick the right tool for the job, will you.
[0]: I know comparing sinatra to PHP isn't ideal, but I am yet to see anyone code in pure CGI in Ruby.
Your observation on abstraction is interesting. I've always considered PHP to be quite the opposite.
e.g. Going from PHP to NodeJS, NodeJS is a lot more direct and less abstracted (handling the request directly, reading the request data incrementally and handling reader state, setting headers and then explicitly writing to the buffer, handling connection state, etc.) - note I do mean NodeJS here, not something like Express
another e.g. PSR-7 I find is, counterintuitively, actually much less abstracted than raw PHP built-ins as it goes out if it's way to map the interfaces to the stack as intended, rather than completely arbitrary weird abstractions. Like the retrieval of query parameters being entirely separate and unrelated to retrieval of the body payload, whereas PHP tends to sort of conflate these things in $_GET/$_POST/$_REQUEST and then doesn't really have obvious intuitive handling of non-x-form-url-encoded payloads. And don't get me started on query string array handling.
I do completely agree with the article though, and I still use PHP a lot. Voluntarily.
But I just found your specific observation surprising.
Agreed, nodejs lets you build servers from the ground up using streams. However, I am yet to see anyone build their first node project without something like Express and just use http.createServer.
The PHP abstractions are not always clear as you rightly point out (REQUEST = GET+POST+COOKIE...), but they are vastly different "magic" that you see in the Ruby land, for eg where you would rarely be ever thinking about cookies at all.
> stock PHP would want you to use the header("Location: https://google.com"); variant
Which is actually a broken abstraction, because in most PHP SAPIs that doesn't actually spit out a header line directly. Instead, it's parsed into its components, and PHP additionally sets the HTTP status code to a redirection one.
The 2 things that create the most beef about PHP are simply:
1. Type Safety (string? int? boolean?)
2. The Runtime Engine (apache? nginx? linux? windows? what file system?)
The flexible nature of these two concepts, leaves any given PHP script resting on shifting sands of uncertainty, which is really the only thing that leaves people feeling inadequate. The willingness to compromise, and accept a runtime where it's hard to debug, permits programmers to put themselves in situations where they'll have a hard time providing a conclusive answer in succinct terms, to non-technical folks disinterested in obscure details beyond the scope of one's external field or daily interests.
It's not because of impostor syndrome, or any sort of psychological underdog complex. It's simply the awareness that there are gaps in what's often expected to be a hermetic seal. And knowing about that, would gnaw at the edges of just about anybody's confidence at a subliminal level.
Every programming language has differences across platforms and servers, and the dynamic ones all have the type safety aspects. Those two arguments cannot be the reason because then javascript, python or ruby devs would be susceptible to the same.
The term "full-stack" has related problems. Most people, regardless of where they center their expertise, have some idea of a layer of the stack beyond which is Somebody Else's Problem.
Actually, even the three layers above that are likely someone else's problem (data link,network, and transport). Full-stack usually means knowledge of the application layer i.e. HTTP and client side.
Honestly, I think that's extremely cheeky usage of the term. I'm of the opinion that you should be able to:-
- talk to a datacentre, get servers, switches, power, network racked and ready to go.
- Do the devops to configure this infrastructure.
- Understand data-layer requirements and generally host and manage a CP or AP system.
- Write the apps that'll live on these servers.
- Implement resonable caching to scale.
- Write the frontend code to implement a design to connect to these systems.
- Have enough knowledge to profile and debug the performance bottlenecks of such systems.
At about that point, you can start to consider yourselve "full stack". Now some could argue that you don't need rack the system or do the devops, but if you don't understand what you're hosting on, how are you ever going to debug an issue that outwith your application?
Alan Kay: "It turns out there was this term called 'coding' back when I started, and the term called 'programming'.
So a programmer actually wrote flowcharts. That was the high-level language used back then. These flowcharts would work on any computer, and what a coder was, was a human compiler for those flowcharts."
I still diagram flowcharts. Usually to convey to one of my internal customers how we envision interfacing with a 3rd party system or solving some complex business logic.
I diagram a lot of things. Mostly for my benefit. I have struggled over the years with what symbol do I use for X but now I just pick a rectangle or predefined process rectangle and label it well. Diagramming helps me get my internal thoughts out and makes the systems I write better and less error prone.
This was also a point brought up in a recent talk [1] on software engineering, and what has happened since the "software crisis" was recognized in 1968.
The speaker, Mary Shaw, talks about Design Guidance, and how a decision chart is "a better organization of a body of design decision knowledge" [starts 27:40] and how we still, desperately, need something like that, and that there aren't any better ways to communicate such knowledge, that the speaker is aware of, than "this ancient chart."
(UML is mentioned later, but under the context that it is dying, which was probably a good thing.)
Diagramming also has the added benefit of being a more precise way of communication how a system works. I've found that a 30 minute discussion can be turned into a 2 minute explanation with the use of a diagram.
Personally, I can't even really think about complex business/application/system logic without drawing it out on a whiteboard.
There's a recent talk [1] by Mary Shaw from Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU). It's about what has happened since the NATO conference in 1968 (dubbed the Software Crisis), and what engineering means in software engineering.
According to their survey, the American workplace consists of ~90 million "casual" programmers, and ~2.5 million highly trained software engineers, and there's a need to get more programmers into the engineering aspects.
> According to their survey, the American workplace consists of ~90 million "casual" programmers
I don't believe that statistic for a second, unless we're using some convoluted definition of "programmers" which includes anyone who can open Microsoft Word.
That would mean half the labor force can program. Ludicrous.
Looking at the slides[1], I'm pretty sure you interpreted that wrong. There are 90M end users of software, not 90M "casual" programmers.
I'll correct some things: 1) The speaker said projection, not survey. 2) I interchanged "developers" and "programmers" at the top of the slide, but the speaker lumps "programming like things" into the 90M "end users," which among others include pretty much all the web people (scripting languages, database interfacing, web server security, etc).
Please see the relevant part at 49:50 [1], but I'll bring it in next.
The speaker pretty much defines "end users"/casual developers as people who do programming like things; "There are something like 90M people out there who are doing 'programming like things'; they are building databases, they are building spreadsheets, they are using scripting languages, they are building sophisticated websites--what are we doing to help them?"
It's a broad category, but I think the confusion is that programming is not simply about writing code, it also includes the overall architecture, and design of a system.
So what I get from this is that end users means anyone who didn't go through the academic channels to learn the engineering aspects, and that's who they need to reach. The speaker had a link to their software engineering programs at CMU [2] in an earlier slide.
Also, see the context in view of the stackoverlow survey--which doesn't add up if you look at the numbers, but the speaker explains it's because some people reported in more than once.--It sought to be an example of how "end users" end up doing "programming like things."
If I remember & stabilize my own situation, I plan to eventually ask you for that story you hinted at that few would believe. I have a few of my own like that which made me say agnostic rather than atheist. It was like... something... was making possibilities connect.
You're spotting the wiseguy aspect but ignoring the other aspect: that it admits I could drop bombs on PHP, even while considering him a real programmer, but kindly and unusually don't due to a rare moment of respect given the story I read. So, the statement both conveys my position and avoids an attack while also delivering a "Hell yeah!" moment of respect.
That you ignored the obvious compliment embedded in that... twice... was tiresome. I won't let it bother me, though. Just helping you follow along. :P
Uh, when I say tiresome, I'm partly talking about the attitude that this would be interesting reading:
that it admits I could drop bombs on PHP, even while considering him a real programmer, but kindly and unusually don't due to a rare moment of respect given the story I read.
PHP is well worn territory, discussion of who is a real programmer or not is just dick measuring.
"PHP is well worn territory, discussion of who is a real programmer or not is just dick measuring."
I agree on the dick measuring aspect. Far as the language, the critiques of it on a technical, semantic, whatever level are well-worn. Yet, they rarely counter PHP with alternatives and suggestions that align with PHP users' preferences and goals. Same for Visual Basic 6 and Excel macro communities. The bombs I'd drop on it would be from that perspective.
I rarely see people on HN and elsewhere doing that when the subject is PHP. Hard to tell where it would be on the spectrum between working my ego and my usual function of pushing people in directions that meet their goals while maintaining a better baseline in software quality, security, extensibility, and maintenance. Undoubtedly some of both but people steadily benefit from those kinds of recommendations. Often other readers rather than person I'm talking to.
When I started out with PHP (cica 2000) it was just another scripting language to make stuff happen on web pages and it was easier to work with than perl.
In 2003, Rasmus who created PHP said: "I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language, I just kept adding the next logical step on the way".
PHP has since been developed into a fully fledged programming language borrowing many of its traits from Perl, C, C++, Java, Tcl.
Now at PHP7, having two major versions since 2000, I can say with some confidence that PHP is a "real programming" language.
This article is just common sense. In every area there are people who pursue excellence and people who are slackers. People who look hard for optimal solutions given the constraints, and people who try to sell whatever they write as "smart solutions".
Web development is very transparent and in the spotlight these days, so it's exposed to a lot of criticism. I wonder how many cases of "smart programming" do we have in C code-bases around the world...
What works is what's "real". I don't care if you're building in php, .net, ruby, or anything else. All that matters is does it work for the user.
Selling software for my own companies for almost two decades, wait, exactly two decades, I've never had a SINGLE customer ask me "what language is this programmed in".
The closest you'd get is anyone running a non standard OS (anything besides Windows).
As someone who does a lot of basic PHP development and makes various sites with WordPress, I think the key point people seem to forget in this debate is that most projects are simple by nature, at least on a technical level.
I mean sure, making a WordPress site with themes and plugins is not as complicated as coding a web app in Node.js or whatever, but the majority of business sites don't really need much in the way of complexity. Just a few pages that the client can add content to and maybe a blog on the site that might send the content to social media sites upon being posted. In those cases, why not use WordPress or another simple CMS system?
On another note, this is also kind of the reason I haven't really gotten the chance to use much in the way of the latest or fanciest technology. Because every idea I get turns out to be one that doesn't need it.
I had the same crisis two years ago. I was on vacation and couldn't stand the thought going back to work doing the same odd and boring CMS PHP stuff i used to code day in and day out. My girlfriend left me at the same time, so i decided to make a move. I quit the job, i thougt i was good at, and went to a company which programmed mostly in C# and F#.
It was challenging, but at the same time so satisfying to be excited again. I learned about functional programming, looked beyond the horizon of my save little PHP and JS world.
I never looked bad to my old me and my old job.
Stay curious and if the moment comes you feel stuck, move on to something similar but yet unknown and challenging.
People like building their own solutions because it is way more fun then just installing Wordpress and adding some plugins. But sometimes Wordpress is more effective.
I've learned a lot about programming from a friend I worked on a startup with. But the business part suffered since the focus was on coding instead of the experience for the end user.
I have friends who are brilliant programmers who made excellent startup employees and friends who know little about programming who are excellent startup founders. I’m not even sure the best programmers make the best startup founders. A friend of mine was amazed when I showed him how to view source code on a website. His startup just raised a million dollars.
I think this has to do with the fact that people who don't program can't focus on the code. They focus on solving the problem.
Sometimes the right solution might be to build my own solutions but since thousands of people are constantly telling me that I'm not a real programmer I doubt my own ability to do it.
People complaining that web developers aren't real programmers keeps web developers from learning programming. The thought that web developers aren't programmers paradoxically keeps me from becoming "a real programmer".
Because my work doesn't count as real programming I have to start every new "real programming" challenge thinking that I don't really know what I'm doing. This creates doubt that limits my ability.
I feel confident in my ability to build what I want on the web but I'm actively doubting if I'm a real programmer.
Most of the web development work I do involves building interactive programs for helping people cope with mental health problems. My clients only care if I solve their problems. Previously we had a super advanced custom built system that was a mess to deal with. I recently switched back to Wordpress because it is way more effective.
I also think another reason developers don't like Wordpress is that it levels the playing field between people who can and can't program. Suddenly anyone can do what it took you years to learn.
People telling me I can't program because I work on the web makes me a shittier programmer because it makes me nervous when I write code that is logical. It is harder for me mentally to write javascript for my application then for writing the css or html and it's not because the logic is harder. It is because I mentally fear that I don't know how to program because the internet keeps telling me I can't. But every time I do it it turns out that I can.
I can feel it in my body when I switch to the js file in Atom. The feeling is fear.
I don't have it for: setting up a new ubuntu server, building a responsive website, styling with css or working with Wordpress because I know this is web development.
I can't mentally figure out what to think about building apps in swift. There is a lot of logic so that is technically "real programming" but there is a lot of styling so that is technically not programming. So I guess I have a moderate fear for it.
My point is that this isn't about the fact that it is harder to write logic then html or css. This is about my own fear. And the idea that web developers can't code makes it worse.
I guess people generally call 'real programming' something that isn't connecting up CRUD forms/pages. And although I would not call it 'real programming' as a term, I do not see that kind of thing as a challenge or interesting at all. I have made / helped make 1000s of sites over the years (in many different technologies and CMS's) and most of them are just incredibly boring and require no kind of programming skills really. So in that sense they are not 'real programming'. If you can install WP, Google CSS changes for the theme you buy or get from the designer and then Google the plugins + few lines of code changes to make it work then that is not 'real programming' in a sense. But it does pay the bills and it pays them well.
I am not sure about other countries, but in NL and DE, for big companies, I see the complex & inflexible (Java) Enterprise CMS software being replaced by WP. Often not openly and company wide, but departmentally for sure. We get asked to consume the content in the 'big corporate' CMS via a webservice or even scraping and when that's done and the WP site runs and can be used to run that part of the site, they ask corporate hosting to do some proxy passing and rewriting. To illustrate (I cannot name names ...), let's say you have an international online retailer and the ECMS contains a different site per country like:
Then the NL dep asks us to recreate their /nl/ site in WP with the content from the ECMS and then they proxypass/rewrite /nl/ to the new server which contains the WP installation.
Why? Because WP allows, for 'low cost' and 'no real programming' to add all the features they want and to allow workflow-free fast updates when they have a special or deals or contest or whatever specific to that country. Not to mention people understand how to use it right away; no courses needed. With the ECMS that all runs via the head office and that workflow is too hard to change so this is much cheaper/easier. Sometimes they don't even really notify the head office but just do it on their own servers. This same thing happens in many companies / institutions that have many 'sub-sites' managed by different regions/countries/verticals.
It works, it makes clients happy and the fact I don't like WP (at all) and the fact I find this kind of thing rather boring not to create code (like you would in Django or Ruby) is not really interesting; the average 'corporate' WP site we deliver has 1 custom WP file with functions the guys who set everything up and integrate the design reuse and (rarely) append.
I would say that if I was to name something real or not real programming, this would be it. And yet it makes a lot of money and, more importantly, it makes clients happy & productive without extremely long processes of implementation.
Edit: Other than that I agree with the article; it is a matter of taste though. Like said I would not call these things 'real or non-real (fake)' programming but I do choose to not do most of this work myself as I like embedded and native mobile work better. That keeps clients happy too anyway.
As you have to be cleverer to debug a piece of code than to write it there is a case to be made that production grade code should be rather boring to write, so as to remain maintainable.
This is why WordPress recommends a few things that annoy a lot of programmers, like using the longer if/while/foreach syntax and mixing PHP with HTML code. It's not elegant, but it's a lot more readable for people who haven't actually programmed much before. So that people whose knowledge of web coding is mostly HTML and CSS related can figure out what to edit without programming expertise or even syntax highlighting.
It's also one of the reasons WordPress (and quite a few other CMS systems that are sometimes looked down upon in the development world) caught on... because they were easy to modify and mess around with for people withot prior programming experience.
There's plenty of work for everyone. No need to call what other people do "trivial" or demean them for not "automating" something after having done it once.
FWIW, automating something can easily be a job orders of magnitude more difficult than doing the original job. It might require capabilities and resources which far exceed what is available at the organization.
Moreover, automation is a complicated continuum of solutions. If you're talking about REAL WORLD computing problems more complex than can be handled by a bash script, NO, you don't automate after solving a problem once.
> Your idealism is so sweet it makes my teeth hurt.
By taking this discussion in an uncivil direction, you provoked a flamewar, which you then jumped into and made worse ("this appears to be an emotional issue for you"). This breaks the HN guidelines. Please don't do that.
On this site, if you can't address yourself respectfully to the person you're responding to, regardless of how wrong they are, it's best to wait until you can.
I am talking about things being repeated over and over again, far more than just a couple of times.
And the only thing organisations are lacking is sanity. The rest is trivial, proven many times. I will regard all of them as lowly and stupid, because this is what they are.
See my rant elsewhere in this thread - this stupid world is full of examples of idiots in charge.
Are you trying to convince me that the morons who designed Oyster are not morons and I should not judge them? No way. They are scum. Should not I judge the deranged NHS bosses? No way! I'd be delighted to see them beheaded, no less. Their incompetence cost human lives.
And I hate it when people are trying to play down the stupidity of others. In my book there is no sin worse than stupidity and incompetence.
Won't you deny that most of the idiots out there cannot code at all, although they call themselves "developers"?
See even the high profile apps for Android for example. Say, "BBC News". Millions had been spent on it. And this shit locks when internet connection is lost. Don't the retards who wrote it commute on a tube? Don't they know how to code asynchronous UIs?
And don't let me even start ranting about the British Gas "Hive" thingy.
The spread of the ignorance and stupidity in this world is unforgivable. And I won't ever be polite to the stupid and ignorant. They're worthless and they deserve the most harsh criticism possible.
E.g., if you wave in first, read that your balance is low, and then go to a ticket machine to top up, it will be counted as a maximum fare travel. Still the case, after so many years.
Those retards did not even think that ticket machines may be available beyond the oyster barriers, but this is very common on many suburban rail stations.
And if they were not such scumbags, they did not even have to think about all that at all. There are trivial formal methods to analyse all possible workflows. The fact they were oblivious of such methods is unforgivable. The incompetent uneducated retards should never be allower anywhere near any technology.
By this "once" I meant big, generalisable concepts like CRUD (read this thread, your tiny bash scripts and such are out out of context). For this, yes, once it is discovered, it MUST be automated, and not doing so is unforgivable.
CRUD is "generalizable" only in textbook examples and behind your wet ears. Actual implementations vary widely from the truly simple to things with staggering complexity.
Attached to each of the letters in the acronym of C.R.U.D. may be arbitrarily complex rules and constraints that can take many man-years to implement, have mission-critical risks, and require maintenance for decades.
ERP's are "crud" applications, are they trivial? Perhaps in your view, admittedly they are shit for end-users and seem "unforgivably" stupid. Well, there's an opportunity for you to become a billionaire in short-order, implement ERP's and make Oracle your bitch. Not up to the challenge? Then perhaps refrain from calling the world stupid.
Yes, they vary widely. With a vast majority of cases being trivial, simpler-than-textbook, and the rest mostly suitable for a nice and clean split between the C.R.U.D. workflow part and all that complex logic you're talking about, which is also usually being implemented by the idiots in a most unsuitable way, using low level languages and no proper abstractions.
And yes, ERP is a pile of stupid shit. But you need an army of morally deprived Oracle-style salesmen to sell shit to the world. I know it well, worked a lot with the Oracle "partners" in the past. Oracle is a synonym for "overengineering".
I see. To be able to write world-class kernel code (or projects like nginx) a programmer must posses at least practical knowledge of advanced data-structures and algorithms (including implementation details), machine architectures and automata theory (FSMs for protocols) - subjects about which typical PHP/JS coder have no idea. That's why they are so sure that there is nothing beyond their amazing coding skills out there.
All your web stuff is not a real programming. Not because it is "easier" or "less valuable" than, say, aerospace or automotive, but because you're doing it wrong. Among all things, the entire web stack of technologies is the most horribly overengineered one.
Most of the frightingly hard problems you're solving should have never existed in the first place. And yes, web devs, it is your fault, your collective responsibility. Web could have been nice. You screwed it.
If you do not think that all that web stack is horribly overengineered, then you know nothing about engineering at all. If you do not see dozens of ways it could have been orders of magnitude simpler without surrendering any functionality, you know nothing about engineering at all.
I have to admit that I did not do any web development
...
I also know about it from interaction with frontend
developers themselves and from toying around it
Do you believe that people who have never done something are capable of understanding it well enough to have the abrasive and ignorantly arrogant stance as your own? You either do and are ignorant, or you don't and are a hypocrite.
I am an engineer. I do not need years of experience in a technology to assess it. And, btw., you may not know what my "toying around" really means in terms of depth and exposure.
So no, it is your astonishing ignorance here. You should stop pointless personal attacks and provide only rational, technical arguments. This thread is already such a code monkey circlejerk that there is no value in adding anything to it.
How about you take your own advice then? Just because I and millions of others don't think the web is "horribly overengineered", doesn't mean I "don't know anything about engineering".
No, it means exactly this. You know absolutely nothing about engineering, and you keep proving it. As well as millions of other similarly under-educated semi-programmers.
Know why? Because there is no place for democracy in science. It does not matter how many people believe in some crap. As long as objective criteria exist, as long as a formal proof is possible, any number of millions can believe in whatever they fancy, and nobody should care about their idiotic fantasies.
And it is dead easy to prove that something is overengineered. You may not know it, with such a background, but complexity is a well defined, objective, measurable thing. If you're curious, look up what an "Algorithmic information theory" is.
An existence of a formally simpler model with a more flexible functionality is a very clear evidence that the other, more complex system is overengineered. Just compare something like Tcl/Tk with your awful web stack.
And should I go into Javascript, the heart of your entire stack? This is pretty much my speciality, I am a PL specialist, so you cannot accuse me of an ignorance here. It is very easy to prove how bad Javascipt is, how horribly it is designed from all the PL-theoretic points of view.
omg I know I'll be down voted for this but... ugh, this guy hasn't gotten anything and it's so super sad. I've a similar background like him, but I kinda felt embarassed reading his post. Mannnnn... you can argue all day long what programming is about and go crey crey on forums and write stupid blog posts... but WHY the hell waste time with that if you could build something awesome in the meantime with all the things that you know and all the tools that you got - like argh come back when you build something awesome I dunno... :/
Totally understandable point of view. I enjoy writing as a hobby so that's the main reason I'm willing to invest the time. This one in particular was because I read the other piece and it bothered me enough that I couldn't sleep.
Occasionally I do some paid blogging for Codeship too.
I ended up jumping all the way to the other end of the "stack" -- web front-ends. Webdev has been a side-hobby of a sort for quite a while, and I pretty much expected it to be a lot simpler than the low level systems programming that I've been doing.
I've been doing web client and server programming for some time now, and I can without a doubt claim that it poses its own set of challenges that compare and oftentimes exceed in complexity to those encountered in the "lower level" programming fields.
I think the entire notion that one type of programming is more "real" than others comes from lack of perspective. Once you dive deep into more than one development layer, use case, architecture, language, or community, you realize that the challenges each one faces are as varied, unique, and interesting as the rest of them.