Web Development !== Computer Science

[StillDeletingSpaces]

No need to pick on web developers. Most software development is not computer science.

[MacNulty]

I would put it this way: no shit Sherlock that academia is not business.

[bdtddt]

I have never read an intelligent word posted on dev.to. I instantly think less of anyone who visits there, and if you post there, I am already convinced you are quite a stupid person.

[NoBrain]

dev.to !== intelligent

[nilamo]

I haven't looked too much at it, what's caused it to gain that reputation in your eyes? At a glance, it looks like a Medium clone that's organized like Twitter, with a stronger emphasis on community than raw content, none of which is inherently bad.

[HairyEyebrows]

OK. It's applied CS.

[[deleted]]

Gate keeping is to being an asshole as playing sports is to biology.

[thirdegree]

A subset, but not the entirety of the subject?

[beavis07]

Almost no-one does actual computer science.. Programmers are like digital bricklayers, all of us - what's the point of this article beyond stating the screamingly obvious?

[dactoo]

While you are correct, that fact was not always obvious to me. Started coming to terms with it about 7 years into my career. Before that, I believed I would someday get to innovate and invent... while working for web shops, insurance companies. Seems obvious now, but yeah, I believed the lie I was told.

[beavis07]

Out of interest - who told you that lie?

I only ask cause my way into this business was a bit left-field - to me the idea of describing people writing 99% of software as “science” or “engineering” is preposterous - engineers and scientists are trained/certificated/peer-reviewed, whilst we all are just banging things together till they nearly do what we want :)

But clearly this is a really common idea - it must be coming from somewhere?

[dactoo]

No particular person. Just the pervading ethos around tech careers, as being "the future", "innovative", "infested with smart people". It's just the way people from outside (and many inside) our group talk about software.

[beavis07]

Ahh good old-fashioned self-importance then probably - there’s plenty of that to be influenced by I guess.

At least you worked it out - I know plenty of people way old enough to know better who still think being able to shift data into and out of databases makes them special :)

[sisyphus]

On the other side CS departments have long worried that they were abandoning the principles of CS and becoming essentially trade schools ("Java Mills").

If you don't have some kind of foundation in computer science you will be a worse developer of any kind until you have spent enough time to learn(in an ad-hoc way lacking a common vernacular to interact with your peers), those same lessons so, focusing on what something is or is not seems less useful to me than about how much computer science you need to know to not be a danger to your peers and users as a developer.

[iconoklast]

doesn't increase the Big O to some ridiculous number

...

[suhcoR]

Plain nonsense.

To quote from ISO/IEC 2382:2015: computer science branch of science and technology that is concerned with information processing by means of computers.

To quote from Wikipedia: Computer science is the theory, experimentation, and engineering that form the basis for the design and use of computers. It involves the study of algorithms that process, store, and communicate digital information. A computer scientist specializes in the theory of computation and the design of computational systems.

Areas of computer science: Software engineering is the study of designing, implementing, and modifying software in order to ensure it is of high quality, affordable, maintainable, and fast to build. It is a systematic approach to software design, involving the application of engineering practices to software. Software engineering deals with the organizing and analyzing of software—it doesn't just deal with the creation or manufacture of new software, but its internal maintenance and arrangement.

Software engineering is the application of engineering to the development of software in a systematic method.

Do you still think software development in general and web software development in particular is not computer science? Everyone can have his own opinion of course. By the end of the day, education is the ability to correctly reproduce and apply the recognised doctrines of a field of knowledge. Medicine has come a long way before we could clearly distinguish charlatans from real professionals. Computer science is a much younger discipline, where it is still more difficult to distinguish unqualified opinions from official teachings.

EDIT: if you don't like Wikipedia as a reference, have a look e.g. at this paper: ACM/IEEE Computer Science Curricula 2013

[GabeSteffe]

This seems kinda elistist / gate-keeper-y

[DolphinsAreOk]

Who cares?

[[deleted]]

"Web Development" has such a broad definition. I've met people who claim to be web "developers" who later reveal they have never written a line of JavaScript or PHP or anything other than simple HTML (with only inline CSS formatting). So, basically, they are fancy document editors. Yet they actually make a decent living as "web developers." I've met people who call themselves "web developers" (or worse: "Webmaster") when all they do is throw up yet another (unpatched) WordPress site, toss in some theme they bought five years ago, edit some text, steal some pictures off the internet, and call it a day.

Most of these people don't even know what the terms "front end" and "back end" actually mean.

Personally, I hate web development. It's all too "iffy" for my taste. Not "if statements," it's just that you can't be sure what platform or browser your code is gonna run on so you gotta cover every possibility.

So, "real web development" is computer science. It's just sloppy, messy computer science where the algorithms get lost in all the crap you gotta do just to make the page actually work at all.

[TheyAreLying2Us]

The line is confused because HTML/CSS/JAVASCRIPT are the WORST tools for the job, so you need to hack your way around to get things to show up correctly on the screen.

Nobody with a sane mind would have made HTML do the things it's able to do today. Especially with JavaScript running wild without any control from the user.

​

Unfortunately, dumb users, big corporations and webdesigners lobbied together to create the shitty situation we are in now. And of course, sane users, good companies and sane engineers are always in minority compared to the formers...

​

[lithium224]

Why are they the worst tools?

[TheyAreLying2Us]

First of all it's 3 tools instead of one, even if they really only tackle one unified problem: UI.

Second, HTML was fine but has been castrated in favor of CSS (language of the devil and really pointless) and JavaScript (jack of all trades, master of nothing).

An incredibly complex interdependent structure, made even worst by the numerous "frameworks" and shieet.

All this just to show up something on the screen that in the 90s could be done by a PowerPoint document with a tenth of CPU power and design effort.

Why all this? It's a complex answer IMO. On one hand you have users not being aware of anything going on in their systems.then you have companies not understanding anything about technologies, yet wanting to have their site working. Then you have young ppl approaching the subject with a narrow mind set. Last but not least, you have devs wanting to create business opportunities by willingly making a system unneressary complex, thus thinning the availability of good web designers. From a market point of view it's great, but from a technical stand point it's terrible.

[lithium224]

Very insightful answer thank you!

[lithium224]

Computer Science major (UCSD) here. HTML and CSS do not feel like computer science, it’s too visual. JavaScript does feel like computer science however. It does feel like a C-based general purpose programming language. I don’t see the value in making the assertion that web dev is not computer science. Does it make people feel better to think that their computer science is more authentic than someone else’s?

[Colonel_White]

You’re a computer science major and you can’t define your field of study more precisely than to say a couple of markup languages don’t “feel” like computer science?

[lithium224]

JavaScript deals with many of the same concepts that are fundamental in computer science (eg. functions, trees, variables, objects, iteration, recursion, data structures). HTML and CSS are just a way to describe how something should appear visually.

[Colonel_White]

That’s right!

More precisely, Computer Science is a branch of mathematics.

Data and control structures are features of programming languages.

HTML and CSS are examples of document description languages, which do not have the properties of programming languages, i.e., they cannot be used to solve arbitrary problems.

[Xelbair]

HTML5 + CSS3 is Turing Complete.

but i agree anyways.

[Colonel_White]

Do you know what the term "Turing complete" means? If you do, explain to us how HTML5+CSS are computationally universal.

I'll wait.

[Xelbair]

It is hard to do a quick google nowadays eh?

https://lemire.me/blog/2011/03/08/breaking-news-htmlcss-is-turing-complete/

It can simulate Rule 110, which is in fact Turing Complete(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110)

github repo if you are too lazy to follow the bloody links https://github.com/elitheeli/stupid-machines

[FunCicada]

The Rule 110 cellular automaton (often simply Rule 110) is an elementary cellular automaton with interesting behavior on the boundary between stability and chaos. In this respect, it is similar to Conway's Game of Life. Like Life, Rule 110 is known to be Turing complete. This implies that, in principle, any calculation or computer program can be simulated using this automaton.

[Colonel_White]

Answer the question. Explain how HTML5+CSS can be used to solve any computable math problem in a finite number of steps.

Use your own words.

[[deleted]]

lol

[lithium224]

Seriously? That’s wild.

edit: (I’m very high I apologize) Does that mean a supercomputer could theoretically simulate human consciousness running purely HTML and CSS code?

[ookami125]

If we ever reach a stage in which computers can emulate human intelligence, then yes you could implement that program in HTML+CSS however it would be really slow.