Btw, I am not a technical person, hence the curiosity. Insights would be much appreciated.
That depends on your web application and what programming problems you need to solve. If you only need to glue together other people's code and components, then not so much. If you need to write your own framework, crunch ratings data for recommendations, custom binary serialize data for your ux layer, or do complexity analysis of some backend algorithms, then a CS major will help you a lot.
> shouldn't universities and students be better off learning how to code web apps since they seem to be in dominant usage
Oh no they're not. The absolute majority of software being produced is for internal corporate use, helping businesses on the inside.
Also, universities do teach web apps, it's just that they're not very complex or interesting problems. HTTP requests go in. HTTP responses go out. You have a framework in between that abstracts this, and there you have it.
That is very true for CRUD apps that make up the majority of web apps. And if you need to do something more complex with a web app, like analyzing data, the CS knowledge required is no different than if it was an offline app, i.e., a CS degree would be very helpful.
However, I think that for the majority of programming jobs out there, a full scale CS degree is a bit overkill.
If you're hiring someone to produce CAD drawings, you don't need a full fledged engineer or architect; you can find someone with a certificate from a tech school.
I wonder if eventually programming will eventually go that route. 4 year degrees for Software Engineers, and tech school certs for Software Technicians.
5-10 years from now, entry/junior-level programming will be blue collar job.Now you're in 2002 and are warping to the present day. Now how much was new? Somewhere in between it got fast and diverse enough to replace television. Browsers got real good at all rendering the same thing. The client side code started getting robust. The noise level is at an all time high. Advertising runs rampant. Fraud is prolific and all sorts of infrastructure is integrated and allows all sorts of use and misuse. Add to this the upcoming significance of mobile computing.
Now with this cadence of the imagination, pole-vault yourself into 2022. It's ten years from now. How is the signal compared to the noise? How is the 'web' doing? How are the programmers that created it? Their upcoming replacements have never known a webless world. Few were trained in college, nor vocational centers, but simply picked the skills up as part of the natural landscape of growing up. Programming has had another 10 years of abstraction. Graphical environments allow programmers to metaphorically build entire program flows the same way a call center employee reads a script. Creativity within these environments is stifled, undesired, expensive. But it pays the bills and keeps the net flowing back at home.
The blue collar programmer of 2022 goes home from their job, fatigued from a day of pointing their fingers at 4 foot glass displays. They feel a relief when they get home to an 8 foot display, where they can run some white collar's program for the remainder of the night. The program is a mix of video games and social networking. It's how a person from 2012 might have felt hanging out at a cheap bar with a few ipads and college buddies. The experience keeps its user distracted and content, the perfectly designed program to contain the 8.3 billion people ever expanding for space and resources.
Because I have a degree in computer science, that theory background meant I could quickly recognise the type of problem I was trying to solve and apply standard stuff I had learned to it. Without that theoretical background, I would have developed something that worked, but it would have taken me longer, it wouldn't work so well, and would probably break in unpredictable ways :)
In short, its never just web development.
Also, you have to remember that universities are not about preparing you for a career. You do not need 4 years of general education if your only goal is to produce web apps quickly.
Finally, non-trivial web apps--those doing something complicated or needing to scale significantly--do need CS knowledge, and even simple ones doubtlessly benefit from it.
You also don't need to be a surgeon to put in a few stitches (though you will have very nice stitches if you are one).
In other words, if all you can do after a Computer Science course is web apps, ask for you money back. As you alluded to, simple web apps have never been easier, but there are lots of highly interesting and difficult coding problems outside of that niche (think search engines, aircraft software, operating systems and the list goes on).
Another common example would be a course in number theory. A common topic in number theory is public-key encryption, much more in-depth than is sometimes covered in other courses. In addition, the techniques that you learn in such a course can easily be applied to any "number-crunching" you would need to do. Here is an example:
Problem 1 from Project Euler (http://projecteuler.net/problem=1): Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000. A brute-force program for this is simple, but it is much faster if we first notice some patterns: (3 + 6 + 9 + ... + 999) = 3 * (1 + 2 + ... + 333). But then (1 + 2 + ... + 333) = 334333/2 (this would be easily recognized by someone who has taken a number theory class), and so the sum of all of the multiples of 3 below 1000 is 3 333 * 334 / 2. Similarly, for 5, there are 199 multiples, so the sum of all of these is 5 * 199 * 200 / 2. But then we must subtract the multiples of 15, since we double counted them: there are floor(1000/15) = 66, with sum 15 * 66 * 67 / 2. So the answer is (3 * 333 * 334 + 5 * 199 * 200 + 15 * 66 * 67)/2 = 299498.
That was a particularly trivial example - number theory will give you a lot more than some parlor tricks like the above. But this example took a loop through n numbers and reduced it to a single line of simple arithmetic. And for someone who understands number theory, this algorithm is as quick to think of as it is for a typical CS student to think of the brute-force algorithm.
I would also venture that a course or two in "Abstract Algebra" would be both beneficial and accessible to CS majors. This is less immediately practical than linear algebra in the above example, but closer in its style of thought to programming than, say, calculus, topology, or differential equations. The abstraction (which many math majors complain about) would be fairly straight forward for a CS major, I would think.