Really. Every time I whine publicly how web programming people aren't familiar with even basic CS, I get a slap.
But really, I should move to web programming. I'll be an expert computer scientist there, probably.
But really, I should move to web programming. I'll be an expert computer scientist there, probably.
/snark (apologies for being offensive, but good lord, what a silly statement - unless I missed the joke)
I stand before you as a counterpoint to your foolish generalisation, and guess what, I know plenty of other people that don't fit your stereotype either.
I'm not saying there's not an element of truth to your statement. See, here's the thing. People throughout the software (or any) industry have different collections of knowledge. There are an endless number of things to learn and each one of us is different and brings a different set of skills to the table.
To be great at web development you spend years learning the subtleties of developing for a vast domain of different platforms. There are bugs in the platforms decades old that I know the intimate details of and have workarounds for especially constructed to fit in with the other bugs in the other platforms we deal with. And that's a tiny facet of what you need to know.
You know what would really happen when you came over to web development? You'd find that a lot of the skills as a computer scientist aren't altogether useful.
You wouldn't be an expert computer scientist. You'd be a junior developer, probably.
Why do we keep conflating the two?
Ideally, they overlap.
Our field is maturing. These difference are only going to become more important.
[1] Note that I said "most programming".
I like to think I take a certain amount of rigor in the choices of tools and processes and design philosophy that reduces the amount and impact of bugs... but if we get a customer complaint about our product we don't generally issue a recall and lose millions of dollars.
It's not that I spend any less time learning theory and application and it's certainly no less challenging in some cases than even mechanical engineering but... it's a liability thing.
Also, I don't write software for aerospace control systems.
I've seen companies advertise "software engineer," positions whose primary responsibilities included running a fleet of Wordpress blogs.
Just a matter of perspective I guess.
Certain segments of our industry are currently engineer heavy, such as embedded, and some appear to be technician heavy. I don't see that as a problem per se but it clearly causes friction occasionally as we tend to conflate them.
But fundamental CS is a different thing.
"Annnndddd.... what reaction do you expect?"
Admitting your shortcomings and try to fix them is not an option at all?
When some central web frameworks do lamest mistakes like making an O(n^2) queue, it is frightening. And instead of deflecting any critique, one may try to fix this situation somehow.
goto:fail - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7281378
shellshock - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8365110
I'm sure whoever wrote this would feel a little chagrin when coming back to their code and seeing how inefficient it was (though it got the job done when the lists were small), and they probably would admit their shortcomings, why wouldn't they?
Condescending snark is really easy, and it's easy to say in retrospect and with time to reflect that most useful code has flaws and point them out - software is never finished, and there are a lot of different levels of experience and requirements. If rubygems had never become popular, this wouldn't even be an issue.
PS Rubygems isn't a web framework, it's a package management tool, so the straw man you're hacking away at is the wrong one.
I was talking about the last one here.
"PS Rubygems isn't a web framework, it's a package management tool, so the straw man you're hacking away at is the wrong one."
My statement about web frameworks was not about RubyGems, it was about web frameworks, and it was an example of the state of affairs in web development.
The story is about rubygems, not web dev.
If you actually cared, you'd be out there using your vaunted skills to improve the software other people use, instead of slagging off other developers on Hacker News.
The problem is, I think, this is NOT happening or at least to seldom because it "does not pay off", because "the aws boxes are sooo cheap!"
I'd say: the aws boxes are way too cheap and effectively misused. What should have been a way to scale up apps with reasonable effort turned into an energy and resources burning landfill. Granted, at least it is a shared landfill which really helps with from the resources/energy point of view.
(Juniors) Coders should be able to power the machines by driving a bicycle ergometer ... as a way to make the homo-sapience grasp the effects of their "mental work" ;)
+1
Edit Could you clarify? Which part of what I said is "bullshit"?
/snark
Bluntly, web devs often screw up in the fundamentals of algorithmic operations and data. Web dev comes out of the horrific slap-it-up-i-tude of the HTML/Perl days of the mid-90s, and its tooling is still incredibly shoddy compared to desktop development. And the really fun part is? Web devs don't even get it. They often think they are the top of the food chain, with the best tools ever built. I still can't even find a tool to match VB 5's capabilities.
One example, from Chrome: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/chromiu...
but, yeah, I've seen some awful non-web code. :)
Back in time when I had to choose if I want to do CS degree I was already paid as a web developer and doing what I was going to study for. Then I asked some friends that were actually studying CS and they told me that they have a very tight schedule with work in the following disciplines : FORTRAN, ASM, C, C++ . I told them that's too low-level for me and probably I will not use it for my work so I decided to go into completely different sphere ( I graduated law ).
Now I'm not the best programmer lived on the planet, but certainly I still do what I love and I'm paid for web development as high as a senior person, because of my experience - not CS degree.
So... If you think you can make benefit to web development, why don't you start with a simple open source contribution to any of the existing projects and reduce Wirth's law [1] a bit with some low-level skills. But for something more complicated, please consider some experience first in that specific area.
Web development is interesting, because it tends to mix in people from a lot of different backgrounds — in particular, some of them come through the design side, and move down the stack. That's good, because it demonstrates the accessibility and flexibility of the stack; it's bad because it can result in suboptimal solutions to common problems.
You probably have the luxury of specializing in one particular language, and maybe a handful of processor architectures. You probably rely on one or a few libraries, and know them backwards and forwards. You probably have your own personal repository of code and tactics that you go back to often. In other words, your knowledge of programming is probably narrow and deep.
Web developers usually don't get that luxury. Top web developers today have to be fluent in a minimum of two programming languages (javascript and a backend language like Python, Ruby, PHP...), use several different fast prototyping approaches (css compilers and wacky templating systems), have a good working general knowledge of everything from the web browser to the web server, and cope with an environment in which at least one of those parts is changing on almost a daily basis. Web development is shallow and very, very broad.
I prefer systems programming but I've worked as a web developer off and on for several years now. I have a lot of respect for any web developer that's really good at it. They aren't lesser programmers at all, and I suspect a lot of them, if they decided to do it, could kick the pants off of most systems programmers.
Of course not. Stop generalising.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3811678/add-two-variables...
Edit: found it https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DougTyrrell/posts/br3kqg6Vet6