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Comment by rzc | Hacker News Reader

I would encourage her to try things other than web development. Make a desktop application, or a program in C, or do some performance coding on an embedded system, or write a webserver from scratch, or wrestle with writing a program with multiple threads. You might say this is too much to expect from a beginner, but no one would have said that 20 years ago. It only seems hard because of how easy web development is today.

Nowadays we have so much scaffolding to work from that it's easy to mistake results for software engineering skill. Many of these projects are mash-ups.

I do admire her dedication, it's a rare quality, but I can't help but think this is the easy way out. Or maybe I'm just getting old.

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It's getting difficult to justify coding anything else, though.

Yeah, web development is certainly in high demand, but I think the experience in other domains would make a better programmer overall.

No it isn't.

There are a lot of things to do that have value that aren't web. There are a lot of things to do that you can be paid for that aren't web. There is some overlap. If it's hard to justify working on any of these things, the parent is going to have to explain why.

Mention some of those things, then.

I suppose programming Microcontrollers for appliances, but I have never seen job postings for that (although they must exist). Might be because I didn't look at C jobs, though.

What I meant is also that most apps these days can be coded as web apps, and it is difficult to justify not doing so.

Well, I'm working in HFT - not very many exchanges speak HTTP.

Web browser tech itself quite obviously can't all be built as a web app.

A lot of things could be built as a web app but it's plain silly to - I don't want to lose access to my text editor when I lose networking (I could run a server on my local machine, but that's several layers of abstraction that clearly aren't necessary and I'm not confident they're helpful).

To be sure, there are lots of things where a web app is quite appropriate - but a view that that's all there is seems myopic.

I'd argue those are pretty niche. I certainly wouldn't focus on browser development unless I worked for one of the three or four big browser vendors.

Text editors have been moved onto the web, and probably more and more text editing is being done online, for example in Wordpress blogs.

Nothing against "native" text editors, but again, how promising would it be to start out developing a new text editor these days? It still happens, but it is rare enough to get the top HN slot when it happens.

Here's a secret - the vast majority of programming done in this world is "niche" for some niche, web and non-web. It doesn't mean the relevant skills are niche.

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