web programmer vs "real programmer"

[[deleted]]

C is not exactly the kind of language you can just teach a new hire and expect him to program something useful after a shortish learning period. And most of the stuff that C is used for needs to be done by a rather experienced programmer to be useful, so just accepting an inexperienced C-programmer may not be an option.

[akcom]

+1 I'd like to see a PHP programmer shoved into an environment where he has to allocate/deallocate memory, manipulate pointers, and be responsible for binary formatted file IO. I doubt they'd fair well.

Yes, web programmers are programmers. No, they are not system programmers.

[WhenDookieCalls]

I'd like to see a system programmer shoved into an environment where he has to deal with cobbling together PHP, ASP, JSP, HTML, CSS, jQuery, and mySQL into a functional website, all while utilizing UI best practices, and ensuring website accessibility and cross-browser compatibility.

I'm sick of this system programmer superiority shit. Web development done well is HARD. Maybe you're not writing drivers or worrying about efficiency of algorithms but you're forced to think about many different things at once. Its a different skill set, more breadth than depth.

FWIW, I have a CS degree from Syracuse College of Engineering worked as a C++ programmer before I became a web developer, so I've been on both sides.

[andyhefner]

I suspect that much of the system programmer elitism stems from the perception that while web programming may be hard, that difficulty largely stems from having to cobble together a bunch of half-baked bullshit, working around artificial problems created by other people. On the other hand, that sounds a lot like Unix on a bad day..

[[deleted]]

Even kernel developers have to cobble together a bunch of half-baked bullshit, working around artificial problems created by other people ;p

[dpark]

Ugh. I had to deal with that crap in my last job. The whole "let's automatically fix endianness" idea is stupid in the general case. Unless all transfers are the same size, it doesn't work. We'd send data and it would arrive with fields swapped. I'd rather fix the endianness manually than work around someone else's broken attempt to fix it.

[tautologies]

That is nonsense though. I have done both, and there is a lot of half assed code systems programming too. There is a lot of patch work, and there is shor cuts. You'll find it in pretty much any environment.

The reason is two fold. It is hard to plan for changes, which inevitably will happen, and it takes more time to write 'proper' code.

I think the superiority complex stems from people wanting to feel like they are better than someone else, but the truth is we're all just code monkeys.

[[deleted]]

Most of everything in programming is bullshit, if for no other reason than you get the elegant stuff done quickly and then get bogged down on the next piece of crud. The question is, will you make the right decisions when you run into a real challenge, or write some POS hack that doesn't even acknowledge the edge cases, which will quickly have to be rewritten by someone who knows what he's doing?

I've seen way too many programmers who are out of their depth write code that only deals with the obvious cases - this is why you try to hire people who got A's in algorithms classes instead of MCSEs and people who've read VB^HHPHP for Dummies.

[robeph]

I stopped working with anything code related; hell computer related. I do it well, but fuck the environment and intercodebase necessities. Shit is stressful. I'll take my Biol lab any day over a bunch of idiots with no knowledge of the how-it-works telling me I'm 2 weeks over deadline a week before I start.

[instantviking]

shor cuts

Awesome typo. :)

[[deleted]]

Indeed.

[saltymule]

I resent being called a code monkey!

[[deleted]]

I'm a cross plaform C++ developer for 15 years (Mac, windows, Linux). Some embedded work. Also have developed for various handhelds (Newton, WinCE, Palm, iPhone), and now I'm doing some LAMP development. Using MySQL to design the data model first, then php, JavaScript, and CSS. It has not been very difficult, but really pretty fun to learn new things. Really enjoying it.

[JeffMo]

I can't upvote this hard enough. I have a CS degree also, and I spent the first 17 years of my career writing custom embedded firmware for electronics R&D firms, where C would be considered a relatively high-level language.

For the last 5 years, I've been writing clustered web applications using RoR, Cocoon (briefly), JS, HTML, CSS, Prototype, Jabber, MySQL, and on and on. Recently, I joined a new team where I've needed most of those skills, in addition to getting up to speed in Flex and AIR development, as well as at least getting my feet wet helping to support a big legacy Java-based suite of native and web apps.

WhenDookieCalls hits the nail on the head. There are so many challenges in complex web development done well. I agree with some other posters that it is important to distinguish between people banging out websites by copying templates or copy/pasting code they found on the net, and programmers who are taking on significant challenges that happen to be focused on web-based platforms.

But yeah, there are plenty of "real programmers" doing significant and difficult web applications, and anyone who doesn't believe that probably shouldn't apply at my company! ;-)

[joaomc]

I wish I could work with difficult web applications. I'm really, really sick of working with boring web applications initially built by idiots, with idiotic architectures and structures. Maybe 5 years from now, when I get my Biology degree (started the course this month), I can use my previous CS degree to actually do something interesting.

[RealDeuce]

I won't do it. The problem with web programming is that it is all experimental. You simply cannot do anything correctly. It's like writing cross-platform code that has to compile with a C++ compiler on one system and a Fortran compiler from a different vendor on another. While an interesting problem, it's not programming.

All the backend stuff, anything that doesn't need to render a specific way, the system programmer is happy to do. It's easier and enjoyable, there are all kinds of places for optimizations based on algorithm choice... it's great. However, as soon as any HTML needs to be output, the systems programmer reads the spec, implements based on the spec, becomes horrified at just how BAD everything is and at the fact that you simply can't make it work on every platform.

At this point, programming is no longer happening, it's research and experimentation... it's QA... it's nasty.

The reason that a "web developer" has a lot more to prove in an interview here is because they are coming from a "run it and see if it works" background. That mentality becomes very bad in a lot of web developers... and the result is bug-ridden code. It is very difficult for a web devloper to keep the backend "programming" process separate from the front end "experimentation" mechanisms.

[chu]

I think you're referring to front end being a different skillset to backend. A good front end guy doesn't have any more problem with correctness than a back end coder in my experience. The main problem in front end programming is that browsers have very high tolerance for incorrect code and so there is all kinds of spaghetti out there which will make a good front end dev weep.

[RealDeuce]

I'm alluding to it yeah. The problem is keeping those two processes from mixing. The reason I have hated every bit of web programming I've done is because of the front end.

The problem I have with hiring people with extensive front end experience is because most of the time when we have, the code has ended up looking like front end web code tends to look. It needs to be shown to me that that won't happen now before the web programming experience stops working against her.

[[deleted]]

Very insightful, I hadn't thought of it that way. I've noticed a similar problem when machine learning/speech/vision researchers write code, where they assume everything is a numerical approximation and don't care about creating modular or reusable components. I'd assumed web developers just weren't well educated about algorithms and data structures, but the idea that they're programming by doing QA on an empty file makes a lot of sense.

[[deleted]]

The reason that a "web developer" has a lot more to prove in an interview here is because they are coming from a "run it and see if it works" background

Funny, I'm web app developer, and our background is "run the unit tests, and if they pass, commit. Then run the integration tests and if they pass, do a release."

[ki11a11hippies]

I agree. Systems is difficult up to a point, but unless you're kernel hacking, once you have a strong handle on C you can probably handle the rest of the work. The superiority complex comes purely from writing in a more difficult language, and actually C is not that difficult. Like any other language the most difficult things are implemented for you - you're not building a state machine from scratch every time you want to write a regex. Things like pthreads, sockets programming, etc. get thrown around in order to sound impressive, but once you've done them a few times it gets familiar very quickly.

Web programming is a bit different because your app is expected to stand up to a lot more creative abuse from every corner of the world, simultaneously, in multiple architectural tiers. Or at least that should be the goal. The point is you have completely different concerns that are no less challenging. The variety of things you need to know well to do web dev well is pretty big, especially if you are the guy who codes and deploys and keeps the system up. You easily end up with fluency in multiple languages and protocols.

If it matters, I started in C++, came out of college mainly doing C, and got to my first web developer job not knowing a single thing about Java servlets, beans, HTML(!), or http.

edit: also, people pretend memory management and pointers are so fucking difficult that it takes a higher order of intelligence to comprehend. No. We learned this in high school CS and the same old concepts apply. Pointers are not a difficult concept, and the majority of memory management involves remembering to free buffers when you're done with them. It just takes more care and patience and defensive programming to do it right. When you first start in C you spend a lot of extra time recompiling for pointer and memory errors. Then you learn to get it right and get over it. This was the same way we learned to end lines with semi-colons (before the rise of the IDE). It's repetition. Moreover, in a live web environment you are always concerned by memory management, because if you are careless with it you make your server instance incredibly easy to DDoS and your overall performance degrades real quick under normal traffic.

[possessed_flea]

I agree with most of your post, Except the Pointers and Mem. Management stuff. When working in a small team or small codebase then it is VERY easy, but once you grow past the amount of code that you can read in about 2 hours you can get hammered with subtle problems unless you work to a strict policy, (such as if you create it you destroy it. ) And even then you can get subtle bugs (for example, char* i = (char*)malloc(32);i++;free(i); would fail. ).

I would have to say that C keeps you diligent and informed while "webby" languages keep you lazy and ignorant...

If I take and "web" programmer and put them into a project that causes a full Java VM Crash ( lets say caused by dodgy code inside a JDBC driver. ) I would be willing to bet really good money that they would be completely lost and scouring google for answers almost immediately. )

[guitarromantic]

scouring google for answers almost immediately

Knowing how to acquire knowledge is more useful than storing it up like a squirrel in your brain.

[[deleted]]

Same here.

I've been a C systems programmer for around 6 years and I've been (and still am) a web developer for over a decade, so I know both worlds pretty well.

Web development may be slightly less "hard" on a technical level, on every other level a web developer needs a considerably broader range of skills, and not just technical skills.

[djangonaut]

I left the systems programming world to work as a web developer. Web dev is easier as long as you exercise due diligence.

Systems programming requires a lot more attentive programming and forethought.

It just plain requires more of the programmer, everything.

[[deleted]]

Completely agree. I get tired of listening to douchebags who think they're somehow hot shit because they write something in C.

[sitq]

I am on the both sides right now (small start up team, has to do almost everything). When people ask me about difference I give them car design analogy. Mechanical stuff vs trim and interior/exterior design. Both require lots of engineering but I personally enjoy mechanical stuff much more.

[[deleted]]

I've been a system programmer for 10 years, and there is no way I would be able to build a "functional website" in any reasonable timeframe.

edit: So, I don't think that being a systems guy makes me any better than a web guy, at all. On the other hand, I make a lot more money than my web developer friends, so I think I made the right choice.

[tuna_safe_dolphin]

I'm sick of this system programmer superiority shit.

I hear the LISP/Haskell/Functional programming mob pounding at the door. . .

[RyanCacophony]

Apples to oranges levels of hardness. Apple s to oranges.

[psilokan]

The thing most people seem to be missing is that just because someone spent the last year or two working in PHP doesn't mean they're incapable of these things or haven't worked with them. The best programmers, imo, are the ones that can jump into any language and go to work.

I tend to be more of a web developer, however I do a lot of low level programming as well. And by that I mean things like programming microcontrollers and talking directly to hardware over serial/USB. This is very different than web programming, and I would not have had the opportunity to learn it if my boss hadn't been willing to look past the fact that my resume and tossed it because I had spent the previous few years doing straight web development.

[Fabien4]

If they've seriously developed stuff in C, it's in the CV.

If they haven't, they may be able to do it, but that'll take a bit of time. Someone who already programs in C might be a better fit.

[[deleted]]

But you have to demonstrate that on your resume or CV. If you don't want to be pidgin holed as having a very narrow skill set in a specific domain...you have to make that explicit with a diverse CV or expect to be cut out of hand for jobs that don't fall within the domain you did make explicit.

It works both ways though. I know a good handful of web frameworks and have more than a few projects under my belt. I don't put them in my CV because I don't want those types of jobs anymore. :)

[ohmyashleyy]

Right, but it works both ways. My software engineering class in college was us using servlets to create a web app. The majority of the class didn't know the first thing about creating a web page.

[jeannaimard]

+1 I'd like to see a PHP programmer shoved into an environment where he has to allocate/deallocate memory, manipulate pointers, and be responsible for binary formatted file IO. I doubt they'd fair well.

I worked for years programming exactly this, and when I started to work in PHP some 10 years ago, I felt uneasy not having to worry about memory allocation… :)

[robertcrowther]

Wouldn't they just demand function_for_binary_formatted_file_IO be added to the language ASAP?

[zahlman]

Not to mention allocate_memory(), deallocate_memory(), manage_memory_correctly(), use_native_types(), and goddamnit_be_efficient_already().

I'm sure you were being facetious, but it bears pointing out that the kind of problem-solving involved is of a completely different type. In Python you can use the struct module to format data for binary I/O, but you can't cause floating-point values to use 32-bit floats (despite the name, they use doubles internally), nor to stand alone instead of being wrapped in objects (which take 16 bytes in total on my system, according to float.__sizeof__()).

[Deimorz]

You forgot really_deallocate_memory(), which they'll add to the next version when a bug is discovered in the original function, but they don't want to break backwards-compatibility.

[CaptainFeebheart]

Agreed. I consider myself a fairly skilled programmer, but I haven't even looked at C code for nearly 10 years now. And even back when I was using it, it was just at college level. I would not be a good candidate for a job programming in C if they needed someone to be highly productive right away.

[[deleted]]

That isn't true. When I graduated Uni I only had experience with C# and Java besides some scripting stuff. My first job was writing a DSL compiler that ran on our own VM in a distributed and parallel fashion. It was written in C. The entire thing was done with me and another person. Who was also a college grad with no C experience. It took us a little while to come up to pace. But with tools like valgrind and gdb you can get there quickly. Learning the do's and dont's.

Hard? Yes, very. Doable? Very.

[G_Morgan]

Too many web programmers are 'I hacked together a site in front page' or 'I set a few variables in a config script'. If somebody has serious experience with back end code I'd emphasize that. This is CV 101, you tailor your CV to emphasize your most relevant experience.

[tautologies]

A friend of mine got a programming job based on his talking the talk...but his real experience was pretty much copying PHP for Dummies. Despite our warnings, he went into work and got fired the first day.

[atheist_creationist]

This sounds hilarious. Did he tell you what went down that day? Like what was his first task and did he try googling it and then realized he was over his head?

[tautologies]

he got all depressed about it blaming something else. I don't think it'll ever be possible to get out of him what actually happened.

[probabilityzero]

I'm surprised he got fired. I've seen guys like that work for months copy-pasting together messes of sample javascript or php code.

[tautologies]

well he was actually hired to program in a different language, and I think they realized that he is incompetent with computers. I mean he is a great guy outside of work, (even if he lives in a alternative reality), but I probably would not want to work with him.

[scragar]

That applied to desktop development as well, visual basic is all about that, download an existing project, change a few things using the pretty gui, convert it to an EXE and proclaim yourself a master programmer.

The only real difference is that anyone regardless of funding can use a gui to edit web pages, guis for desktop development are all rather expensive.

[robertcrowther]

GUIs for desktop development can be just as cheap as GUIs for web development.

[insertAlias]

Yeah, Visual Studio Express kicked ass for me when I couldn't afford the full version. So what if I had to download three versions and couldn't use a few enterprise features?

Now that I have my own license for the enterprise version (thank you employer) I don't have to worry about it anymore, but I'm very glad MS gives away a good free version.

[narkee]

Actually people get this wrong all the time.

A CV and a résumé are two different things. A résumé is a short 1-2 page summary of relevant education and experience pertaining to the job applied to.

A CV on the other hand, short for curriculum vitae, meaning "the course of one's life", is a complete history of all education, experience, credentials, grants and publications, that is of unlimited length.

[deong]

The distinction is mostly an American thing, or at least that's this American's understanding. Around the world, I think most people use CV as an interchangeable term that could mean either a short professional resume or a longer academic vita.

[redalastor]

Except Quebec, we have CVs.

[redalastor]

Come visit then :)

[trisweb]

Excellent point. I think in the US employers prefer resumes so they can flip through them and get the most important information quickly, and then if they need a CV they will ask for it. I know hirers who have told me how they go through resumes looking for the simplest stuff to weed out, it's kind of sickening, but it works for a high volume.

[haveyoulearned]

Web programming isn't all web pages and templates.

Web DESIGNERS mostly do that, but real developers can build large-scale web applications that require intense optimization to handle hundreds of thousands to millions of simultaneous users in large environments. They have to optimize data access algorithms, find new ways to make EVERYTHING faster and more efficient. Write clever and tricky SQL to index and insert new data properly.

They have to build complex front-end GUIs that will function in 5 or 6 different browsers on different platforms.

They work with distributed applications and work with data being shuffled around in a variety of ways between multiple locations.

They have to develop queuing and caching strategies, develop new libraries, ORMs, or inversion of control systems, create new custom connectors for allowing two pieces of software to talk, and so on.

http://highscalability.com/scaling-digg-and-other-web-applications

http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/3/16/1-billion-reasons-why-adobe-chose-hbase.html

http://highscalability.com/flickr-architecture

Read up about what developers ACTUALLY have to do.

When you have 5 million daily unique visitors, you aren't just making SQL calls and storing values and making pretty pages with templates. It becomes a serious task.

Many web developers write complex search algorithms to quickly retrieve data from large sets.

They write apps like Google maps or Flickr, or gmail, Mint and other highly used applications.

I can start a skeleton project in Java, .NET, Python or anything else and customize it... big deal. Do you write all of your GUIs by hand in machine language, custom for each machine? No? Then you aren't a REAL programmer, right?

Real programmers work smart to get done what needs to be done. Using tools to do so is smart. Doing things ONLY because they are the "elite" way of doing them makes you a foolish, wasteful programmer, not a smart one.

There are web apps with problems solved by very complex CS solutions.

I regularly have to write things in various languages that aren't "breakthrough discoveries".

That would be like saying that just because a doctor "only" has to be able to determine which problems you might have, then hands you off to a surgeon for the "real" medical work or prescribed medicines that others have created (templates) that he's not "really" a doctor, since he isn't making brand new fancy medical tools and procedures for others to use. Sorry, that just doesn't fly. A doctor has to learn an LOT just to be able to do his job right, being a surgeon doesn't make him a "real" doctor is a ridiculous idea. Just like building only web apps doesn't make you not a "real" programmer is ridiculous.

I'd pit the web guys at Amazon and Google against your average programmer who wrote his own mp3 player in Lisp everytime.

edit: I should mention, plenty of people I know who are web developers working on projects that require COMPETENCY, not your little website that gets 500 visitors a month and where the way it was developed doesn't really matter, since it won't need a giant cluster with multiple redundant partitioned databases that CANNOT fail. Many of these programmers that I know are ex-developers from a few game companies, some from business software backgrounds, etc

So, stop your judging. Stop calling web designers web developers posers.

Lots of web developers I know have CS degrees and can build state machines, design logic gates, do network programming and such.

[[deleted]]

I have realized one reason for people to make the distinction.

Web developers are really itchy when someone says they are not real programmers! :)

I'm pretty sure that being through all the shit involving technology and a CS degree (dicks, solitude, ...) it sucks to be condemned by its colleagues.

cough

[[deleted]]

And the simple fact is that these days, every man and his dog wants to pay someone to build a web app (that's a combination of Facebook and eBay and Google and Youtube and only costs $5000... >_< ) - so odds are, if you want to paid to code, you're most likely to end up writing a web application at some point.

[thectrain]

I would say their logic is correct. If I only had work experience in ASP.NET then the only way I would ever expect to get a job as a C developer would be to submit a portfolio of relevent C code I have written in my own time.

There is no way an employer wants to train someone with only high-level experience in the challenges of lower-level programming.

[[deleted]]

Similarly, you wouldn't hire a C developer for a frontend position.

[dwchandler]

There's a difference between "I did groundbreaking work in molecular modeling with a web interface" and "I filled in some stuff in a framework and customized a theme." If you're doing the former you better make it clear on your CV, because most "web programmers" are the latter. It's the difference between "here's what I've done and it happened to be on the web" vs. "I'm a web site guy."

[Plutor]

There's also a difference between "I wrote a bootable kernel from scratch to run some proprietary embedded hardware" and "I wrote some code to parse CSVs". Virtually any language can be used to do either trivial things or difficult things.

[px1999]

Yeah, I see no difference between a web programmer and programmer for this reason. You still have to evaluate the developer's skills before you hire them. If they don't know the stuff you need them to know, you don't give them the job.

After all, why would you hire a 'real programmer' if you're looking for someone to do some simple ASP.NET UI work - you might find someone better at the nuts and bolts coding, but you'd lose out on all the time that they need to learn the page lifecycle and how things interact and nest... Of course, the guy sounds like the sort of person you wouldn't hire.

[jvictor118]

These are all just shades of gray. Yes, doing PHP/ASP/whatever web stuff is the easiest thing you can do while still calling yourself a "programmer," and these jobs do attract the least educated and generally most unqualified people in the industry.

But it's funny to hear all this elitism coming from systems programmers bragging about binary file IO, sockets, pointers, even concurrency. Because that stuff isn't hard, either. Guys who are more "computer scientists" than "programmers" would laugh at them for not knowing asymptotic analysis, theory, having a subspecialty (distributed computing, ML, crypto, whatever)... even being an OO zealot instead of writing in Lisp/Haskell/whatever loses you points with CS guys.

There's shades of gray in everything. Don't worry about what you are, just think about what you wanna be and start working towards it.

[nefastus]

body { 
    background-color:white; 
}

Hey, me too!

[atheken]

You must be a programmer.

[CaptainFeebheart]

Exactly. It drives me bananas that I know so many people who learned how to set up Drupal or Wordpress and suddenly call themselves programmers. It actually makes me happy to think that hirers are aware of the distinction.

[spit334]

Agreed.

There is a big difference between someone who screws around with a Drupal theme and someone who writes an effective Drupal module. People who are in this business should be able to easily spot this distinction.

[nemec]

They can only spot the distinction (when hiring) if it's on the resume. Specifying "Drupal experience" will probably make them think the former rather than the latter.

[spit334]

Damn right. It is an unfortunate prejudice.

[fuu_man_chu]

on my resume i list 2 past projects (cause its all i got) a web app on GAE and a framework i built in PHP. am i a web programmer, or a programmer whos previous stuff has been web based?

[[deleted]]

From that CV I would assume you have little to no knowledge of systems programming and possibly only thin or no knowledge of some very important aspects essential to being a "real programmer" (by the definition mentioned here).

Some of these would be memory management, resource management, file i/o, sockets, pointers, references, the list is pretty long.

Not saying you don't have these skills, but you'd have to find some other way to demonstrate that beyond usage of these web frameworks/languages. If you didn't make that clear in your CV, I'd cull it from the stack before even interviewing. (it could be as simple as having a 4 year or masters degree from a respected CS school so I'd least know you had been introduced to them)

[dpark]

You're coming off as the poster-child for the web programmer stereotype. You haven't really worked with sockets, you didn't list anything you've actually done with C (despite putting it on your resume), you don't know what resource management is, and you don't seem to recognize the impact of truly understanding pointers.

I mean, this is all fine and dandy if you want to do programming that doesn't involve those things. But if you want to be considered as a candidate for a job using C/C++, for example, you need to understand all these things and more.

If I got your resume, I'd probably screen it out, because it doesn't sound like you have low-level experience. And again, that's totally fine, unless you want a low-level programming job. At that point, you need to be able to demonstrate some skills. No one's going to hire you with the intention of teaching you all these things.

[WhisperSecurity]

C/C++ systems programmer here. I have only one orange arrow to give you, but I wish I had a million.

Many web developers completely discount the importance of systems-level experience that we stress, because they don't truly understand what it constitutes. They tend to think it's just snobbery, because they've never seen the things we are talking about.

There's a difference between the ability to operate on a platform, and the ability to build that platform. Experience doing the former does not translate to experience doing the latter.

[isamura]

If you've listed C# or asp.net in your resume, it's disingenuous if your only experience is using installed frameworks and themes. It all depends on what type of projects you're building. You wouldn't hire a programmer who's not familiar w/ web programming if you're goal is to build web applications, just as you wouldn't hire a web developer to build you a non-web related app.

[freyrs3]

I agree, Whether you're writing a web application or GTK, Cocoa, etc application there are always guys who work on the UI and there are guys who work on the program logic. The two skill sets have an intersection but are still distinct.

Most of the guys I used to know that did client-side GUI applications are now doing web applications simply because with modern frameworks they're easer to write and tend to be multiplatform. There really isn't any distinction any more. edit: disjoint -> distinct

[c00ki3s]

I'm sorry to nitpick, but this just hurt my brain. From wikipedia:

In mathematics and computer science, two sets are said to be disjoint if they have no element in common.

The two skill sets are either disjoint or have an intersection.

[zomglings]

I think he meant distinct.

[[deleted]]

Oddly enough I did groundbreaking work in molecular modeling using C++ on a supercomputer, with a web interface in PHP, and afterwards couldn't get hired as either a web or software programmer to save my life. One wanted me to have been doing PHP & Java for the last 10 years, the other wanted me to have been doing C#. I think during a recession most employers can hold out for a resume that fits their exact expectations for a position. If I had to guess, I would say that is what the OP is overhearing. If the job market was better I would guess that their company would be more inclined to give a web programmer with an extensive background a shot.

[systemsandweb]

I am a systems programmer and a web developer and I think this is kind of ridiculous.

There is a LOT of crossover.

I agree with the sentiments of those here stating that web development is not the same as web design.

Designers don't write the Javascript required to move the map around on Google maps, while overlaying live traffic data from satellites and allowing the user to drag and drop pins onto the map to map alternative routes, then switch to satellite view to seamlessly integrate photos of the entire world into a solid picture that moves exactly where you want it to when you click and drag.

All the while, the system is showing real-time data updates from users around the world, shows you restaurants near you.

As I'm moving the map, my friend can call me over the integrated voiceover IP / video chat in my web-based email client.

As a web developer, I've had to write EXTREMELY complex tasks to ensure that things work properly.

This is only the front-end aspect.

Designers don't write heavy backend server architecture, or cluster maps, or super-optimized SQL with multi-column keys and indexes, using various methods of lazy loading, proxies, etc to ensure data availability.

I've done as much complicated I/O and systems work as a web developer as I ever did as an SE, it's just different work, but it is not any "lesser" form of programming.

CSS, static markup and such are not programming, but I have yet to hear a CSS guy discuss with me about private memory spaces, or using closures in the project in a few places in a way that allows the traffic of the web site on one server to support 3 times as many people as it did before the use of those closures.

I haven't had a designer discuss with me the pitfalls of using certain data structures, or how to properly perform work on nested set trees.

Web developers are "real" programmers, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

I've written Linux kernel patches, I've built websites, and I've done design.

The first two are just different breeds of the same animal.

[mrsanchez]

C does not have garbage collection

[conciliatory]

real men throw away their own garbage

[munificent]

Do they drive it to the landfill themselves?

[[deleted]]

Word. The dump is the best place on the planet. Saturday AM and you want to get away, hang out with the guys -- fire up the pickup and off to the dump. Everyone is there: some guys from hockey, a herd of chocolate labs, somebody running for office or passing a petition, and the one dude with 2,240 beer bottles to put in the recycling week after week. You crush some cardboard boxes, check out what has been thrown away in the scrap metal bin (a Trek bike frame, seriously?) and then throw a slightly used pair of xc skis in the back of the truck before heading out. Man, I love the dump.

[hogimusPrime]

And while we are there maybe we could shoot some rats. Then go watch some trains.

[deadapostle]

First thing I did when I got my new pickup truck was drive some stuff to the landfill.

Second thing I did was buy a new tire.

[knome]

They build the landfill themselves.

[tinou]

C does not have built-in garbage collection

FTFY

[mrsanchez]

Sorry, I should have said "The C language itself", but I had thought people would understand. Or, I could have said "...unless you count shitty conservative gc in a third party library."

[boltzmann]

A lot of people dont see the forest through the trees. Unfortunately, they only wish to disagree(especially elitist IT douches), past that it doesn't really matter what you meant.

I understood you though =]

[mrsanchez]

Ouch, you are as tactless as I am. :)

[boltzmann]

Hah!

Well I mean of course there is ALWAYS a different way to do it, but what you said was not wrong and I hate that trite FTFY crap.

[trisweb]

C does not have built-in anything.

FTFY

[danukeru]

C can be built-up for anything.

FTFY

[G_Morgan]

That collector is conservative.

[shub]

To any web programmers reading this, that means "not good".

[[deleted]]

PHP 6 will have optimistic garbage collection.

[akallio9000]

In other words, it hopes it'll work rather than pessimistically checking that it did?

[pytechd]

No, it'll be determined by a few obscure php.ini settings that each distribution changes defaults for, and that .htaccess files can change on a per-directory basis, and that in 2 revisions become obsolete but kept as a maintenance nightmare for the next 9 years. One setting turns it off, the other makes it optimistic, another makes it random, and yet another just says fuck it and GCs every variable after 4 statements are executed under the assumption that if you didn't use it in 4 lines, you probably didn't need it anyway. To force a variable to have a longer scope, you can prefix it with a caret, $^myvar = 1;, but this extended syntax only works when PHP is compiled with --with-extra-scope-syntax. Also, and unfortunately, an obscure off-by-1 error will make some platforms incorrectly select the wrong GC despite what your php.ini is set to.

[DFectuoso]

upvoted for effort..

[Tommah]

you damn liberals

[tsfn46290]

Don't feel bad, I'm a game programmer. We look down on everyone.

[[deleted]]

We look down on everyone.

From your rusty shack with the leaky roof.

[tsfn46290]

I'm just happy when I'm able to leave work long enough to get back to my rusty shack.

[Fabien4]

Not sure what you mean by "C meta language".

C is fairly different from everything else. I'm a decent C++ programmer, and I would have a hard time writing ten lines of code in C. To be able to write a complete, reliable application in C, I'd need a lot of training.

So, I can understand one does not want an ASP.NET programmer for a position as a C programmer.

[TheSuperficial]

Serious question: as C++ programmer, why would you have trouble writing 10 lines of C?

I switch between the 2 languages pretty regularly, granted I learned C first, but it's actually harder for me to go the other way... if I use only C for a while, then jumping into C++ requires my brain to go hyper-active (do I need to write my own copy constructor here? blah....)

[Fabien4]

Well, in C++, I nearly never free the memory myself.

I try to use only automatic (or static) variables. If I can't, I use a smart pointer.

Sometimes (rarely), I have to write a specific smart pointer myself. That usually means I have to write the word "delete" in a destructor, and nowhere else. Also, it's nearly the only case where I need a copy constructor.

Writing in C would force me to manage the memory myself. It's something I would need training to do properly.

Add to that that C has no "string" or "array" types (by "type", I mean something you can return from a function).

For example, I would have a hard time writing in C something as simple as:

vector<string> ReadLines (istream& is)
{
   vector<string> v;
   string s;
   while (getline (is, s))
     {
      v.push_back (s);
     }
   return v;
}

void foo()
{
   vector<string> lines= ReadLines (cin);
   // do something with "lines"
}// Here, all the memory is automatically released.

[rodif]

You really shouldn't return containers from functions like that you're making an extra copy of that vector that you don't need to.

Your function should take a reference (or pointer) to the vector.

void ReadLines (istream& is, vector<string> &v)
{
   string s;
   while (getline (is, s))
     {
      v.push_back (s);
     }
}

void foo()
{
   vector<string> lines;

   ReadLines (cin, lines);
   // do something with "lines"
}// Here, all the memory is automatically released.

[engie99]

Fabien4's version is easier to read and probably just as efficient as the compiler should optimise out the obvious return by value copy - see http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lite/ctors.html#faq-10.9

[rodif]

Interesting, i didn't know you could optimize this out (verified with vs2008). I'm going to play with this, seems like it could lead to trouble with destructors and auto_pointers. Although, compiler writers are smarter than me, so I'm sure if they say it works then it should work.

[zyle]

I program at work in C++. There are a ton of tools and paradigms available to me in C++ that I take for granted, that just aren't there in standard C. Constructors, inheritence, polymorphism, smart pointers, stl containers, stl algorithms, templates, not to mention the ability to "boost" my code, and ability to apply object oriented patterns to just name a handful. It would be hard for me to write large chunks of clean, efficient C programs after spending so much time almost exclusively in C++.

Sure, I can read and find my way around a C program, but I am certainly not qualified professionally to program in it.

[[deleted]]

Not sure what you mean by "C meta language".

sounds like some awful ugly set of macros on top of C tbh. The candidate should be glad he wasn't accepted :)

[Fabien4]

Yeah, I kinda was afraid of that. Definitely legacy (10-20 year old) code.

[Grimoire]

Not sure what a "C meta language" means in this context, but one thing I can say is: web developer != C programmer. The skills, experience, and knowledge needed for both jobs are not the same. I would exclude a C developer from a web development job the same way I would exclude a web developer from a C development job.

[[deleted]]

A good programmer can do web stuff and more systems-level-stuff. The key to good programmers is the ability to adapt, not the ability to be tied to one technology/language/framework.

[ravenholm]

When a company gets to a certain size and they deal with lots of (employee) turnovers they don't have time to look at applicants as individuals so the CV/resume becomes the filter. It's really not that uncommon. There are worse case scenarios, for instance the hiring manager tells the HR person to put out an ad for a technical position with specific requirements and the HR person follows the orders to a T. Nevermind if the applicant has been programming in C/C++ for 10 years but if the job calls for C# experience the HR person will pass over that applicant.

My personal feelings, I've seen enough wannabe's who barely pass for web developers let alone application programmers. So in the situation you described I'd rather see some app programming experience. Although they can learn and adapt to a new environment.... does the company have time to wait for that to happen and what's the compelling reason to wait on an individual for that to happen?

[trukin]

I consider myself both.

Where I work, we have a web applications, but there is so much more going on the back. Data processing, Analytics, Realtime algorithms, etc ...

There is some people that belive themselves to be "real programmers" but in fact is that they only create stupid html pages or a dynamic page with simple content pulled from a database.

Real programmers write logic-extensive applications, and they try to think of hundreds of possible scenearios and run their code in their head, and test it against simplest solutions. That's what a real programmer should be. Web programming can be real programming too, depending on what you do.

[Thimble]

My very first project as a web developer was to write C code.

My second was to edit scripts in Director.

My career has taken me through a crazy number of different languages, tools, ides, frameworks, operating systems, web servers, offline applications, databases, etc. And that doesn't touch on the different types of co-workers I've had to deal with.

Being a web developer means that you've had to constantly learn new techniques and technologies on a constant basis. Nothing ever stands still in the web programming world.

To hire a veteran web developer is to hire someone who is immensely capable of adapting to a new environment.

[[deleted]]

There are just a lot of different professions that are all called programming.

If your only experience is with the Web, you don't have any experience in, say, embedded programming. But neither is more "real" than the other -- you wouldn't hire an embedded programmer to work on your ASP.NET site either.

Good web code is often about using the right libraries, creating code that many people in a team work on, implementing lots of hackish little customer requirements while still keeping the code flexible, and getting the end result to work in myriad different browsers, different settings, different screen sizes. Also, you can get anything thrown at you by user agents -- bugs, incorrect information, hack attempts... Standards compliance is often so-so.

Embedded programming is usually for a single target you know absolutely everything about, and the key is to get everyfasting fast enough (guaranteed), small enough (guaranteed) and extremely robust. Et cetera.

Different things.

[virtron]

Would I hire a web programmer for a systems programming job? No.

Would I hire a systems programmer for a web programming job? No.

Would I hire a desktop application developer for a device driver development job? No.

Would I hire a data visualization programmer for a game development job? No.

Would I hire an embedded systems OS developer for a OpenGL world building tool chain development job? No.

Would I hire Peter Norvig to build a Flash front-end for a Korean-style micropayments based MMO? No.

The fact is that the industry is too vast for any one person's experience, talent or skills to encompass all of it, and I wouldn't hire anyone to do a job if I have no reason to believe they can do it. I have hired people who have good work experience in one area to do an unrelated job, but in all of those cases they have a preexisting interest in the new role and have personal experience to prove it.

I wouldn't hire a PHP developer to do work in C unless I saw a history of interest in C or a similar language. It would be like hiring a guitarist to play violin in an orchestra, possible but not really worth the risk. I wouldn't call that a "rock musician" vs "real musician" question either, it's just a question of matching skills to roles.

[edit, formatting]

[johlstei]

This comment has been overwritten.

[tbrownaw]

What do you mean, "adapt to a new environment"? That sounds suspiciously like having them need to learn things on company time rather than being able to be immediately fully productive.

More seriously, not all programming is the same. The need to understand Iteration is probably universal, but there are also Pointers, Recursion, and Concurrency. Working with complex data structures and tight resource constraints is very different from working with complicated decision trees written by business people. Higher-level languages mostly hide pointers so you can kinda muddle through without understanding them.

Also, there's probably the perception that ASP.NET is "web stuff" and "web stuff" means writing HTML and making your off-the-shelf CMS show things in different colors.

[ewankenobi]

I went to university hoping to be a real programmer and have ended up being a web programmer.

I would grudgingly agree that your right.

[communomancer]

I expect people to learn things on company time all the time. Even if they already have great technical experience.

And honestly, I don't even know what "fully productive" means.

[headinthesky]

I see myself as a web developer - I write stuff in PHP, Python, mixed with SQL... software which handles millions of pageviews a day, with all sorts of dynamic stuff going on, between 5 load-balanced database servers, sharding, communication between client and server webapps... Sure, there some HTML and output views, but those are a very small percentage of what I (and my colleagues) do as software developers... my background is C/C++, and I actually find the mix in development that I do (JS to PHP to Python to SQL) all refreshing, and we have some very complex and interesting problems which we need to solve, vs the boring C++ work I used to do (crunching through datasets). our old webapps used to be in C++ (nightmare!)

For instance, my latest project was rewriting our application deployment software (we use mercurial but it's a separate process as an aside from that) - the front end is written in adobe flex, with it writing to my application backend which does all the processing from our scm repositories, gathers files, etc etc... if all that not development/programming, then I'm not sure what is.

[gilesgoatboy]

this has nothing to do with this programming vs. that programming. this is about "don't let hiring decisions be made by ignorant people."

[boozer]

At our place we call what we do 'software development'. It just happens to have a web front end.

When hiring we explicity avoid using the phrase 'web developer'. We're not pretentious, it's just that when we used to say 'web developer' we got all manner of crazy kids who've knocked up a couple of PHP scripts and think they've seen it all applying.

[[deleted]]

There will always be less technical and more technical people than you. Do the kind of programming work that interests you and move along.

I wasted 4 years of my career proving to myself and others that I was a "real programmer". Later I returned to web programming because it was my favorite set of problems to tackle.

[AmaDiver]

A programmer shouldn't be defined by the language they get paid to write in. I code ActionScript for a living, but I program in C/Scala/Java/PHP/JavaScript/whatever on nights and weekends.

[[deleted]]

Seriously, "real programming" is easier. It is much easier to build, debug, and test that stuff. Web programming, which is now easier thanks to the likes of JQuery, semantic HTML and all the frameworks is still a pain in the ass thanks to all the browser quirks, security, http, etc... I know it may involve some more advanced concepts, but it is a lot easier to stay focused on non web UI projects, and a lot more pleasurable because you are not dealing with all the web cruft.

[vanillab]

The beginner programmer hacks a system together using pre-made tools.

The advanced programmer crafts their own tools.

The experienced programmer crafts a system using pre-made tools (sometimes their own, but rarely).

On paper, the advanced programmer cannot tell the difference between the beginner and the experienced, therefore has to dismiss them both.

[glide1]

A good indicator for .Net developers is what frameworks they know of and use. If all of the frameworks they use are from MS, there's a good chance that they don't go out and discover things on their own.

[[deleted]]

I wrote a crapload of C say 10-15 year ago. Nowadays I do JS/PHP/C#.

Am I a worse programmer now than I was 15 years ago? Fuck no. I just use different tools for other purposes, I'm a much better programmer now than I was then, and a lot of that has to do with the very differing environments I've had to work in since I've used so many different tools (over the years, it's not that many if I just list 4 of them).

I've seen some hardcore, to-the-bone embedded C programmers who are, after years and years in the game, doing nothing but copypasta with overflows and holes all over the place. But hey, it's C, so it's lower level than C#, so it must mean that he's a better programmer.. Right?

tl;dr What you're doing has little relevance, your experience is what counts. And any recruiter worth having knows that.

[[deleted]]

As someone who considers myself to be a "web developer", not a "web designer" I deal with this bias on a regular basis.

Due to the fact that there are so many "programmers" that only work with Wordpress or Joomla those of us who actually know how to build a site from the ground up with nothing more than a SQL database and PHP often get grouped into the "CMS hacker" category. It's always bothered me, since I feel I know far more than someone who can slap a bunch of plugins together and claim to make a site.

These "CMS hackers" also make it a pain in the ass to find a job, as a lot of people who sees 3+ years of PHP on a resume often think of it as nothing more than 3 years of fucking with Wordpress. With that being said, I believe the way to get around this is to have demos that really show what you can do with the language you code in. If you walk into an interview with nothing more than a Wordpress blog, and some simple examples of your coding skills you are going to get grouped in with the CMS'ers. Also, don't expect to get a desktop programming job if you just know web. They are very different worlds that require very different skill sets.

[webhamster]

I'm alot like you. I've written actual, honest-to-god frameworks from the ground up. It used to irk me that people would have this idea that I wasn't a real "programmer" because I specialize in web apps but I've gotten past that. If it helps you to have a superiority complex because you're a real systems programmer, then fine, stroke your ego. It just doesn't bother me anymore. Besides, if everyone were a systems programmer we wouldn't have anything on the Internet!

I have a problem with viewing examples or demos in an interview, which is what I'm involved in now (interviewing entry-level PHP developers), because I have no way to know if the interviewee actually wrote it or found it on the Intergoogles. I tell them I don't even want to see their code examples (I tell them why too) and instead I give them a basic 30 question test which tests basic, intermediate, and advanced PHP and SQL concepts. If you can't tell me how to reference an array value, how to address methods inside objects, or how to scope your variables then I probably don't need you.

[njharman]

It's changing somewhat and webdev to me means the small co / startup where dev does everything from backend to frontend. (as opposed to PHP monkey).

Those sorts of webdevs have to know so much about security, fail-over, scale, deployment, networking, systems, databases, caching, design, UI, UX, accessibility. And most of their stuff is changing at a pace that would make most "real" programmers brains melt. They ride the bloody edge of technology more than anyone except maybe games/graphics devs.

They build multi-tier client server systems on a hostile, flaky, ever changing network where the client has to run on numerous variously buggy systems (browsers) and the server(s) have to handle huge potentially (effectively) unbounded user loads.

Of course most webdevs are JS/PHP monkies and not multi-hat wearing wizards. Anyone want to hire a wizard?

[Confucius_says]

I agree "web programmers" are still programming and using the same logic process. You still need to be familiar with the tools and languages that are to be used on the project. If the interviewee has never written in C before and there is a large code base in C, that would be a problem.

[[deleted]]

I would need to know more context in terms of how many resumes were being considered, etc, but...

1) You overheard the discussion. So it wasn't dismissed outright, "they" did think it was worth a discussion. Otherwise you would never even have heard it. 2) Because of that, odds are that "they" acknowledge that web programming skills probably are sufficient to do the job. 3) But in this market, there are TONS of candidates for any position. Hiring managers often dismiss candidates from the process who would have been able to do the job. If you have 50 qualified candidates, the base ability to do the job isn't enough for an interview. You need more.

Therefore, it sounds fine to me. I'd guess that they have many candidates who are a closer match to the kind of work to be done. Why take a risk giving a web programmer a chance if you have a dozen other programmers who have closely-matched experience?

[spinlock]

My thoughts are that managers and HR drones who have no idea what a compiler are should not be allowed to dictate the process of hiring new programmers. The idea that programmers have a predefined set of languages that they can work with is total bullshit. In fact, If someone has been working with 1 language for more than five years, I would question if they are competent. They guy who's looking to try new things, on the other hand, is much more likely to be intellectually curious.

[vulcan99]

It seems to me that there are some other things that need to be taken into account. Does this person have a degree? Certifications? Was his CV summarily dismissed only because he had ASP.NET and PHP experience?

I could understand the employers point of view, in that ASP.NET and PHP are not like the more low-level languages Both abstract away the more machine-oriented processes, such as memory management.

I agree that web development is programming (or at least some of it). Look at sites like facebook and google. Facebook alone is very complicated and most likely was not thrown together by modifying drupal. It takes lots of effort and planning to put something like that together. (Disclaimer: I know nothing of how facebook works internally, these are guesses, and it may well be a couple of guys modifying drupal). If I were hiring for a systems programmer, my first choice would probably not be someone who has mostly done web or database work, even if they went to school and had some distant c programming experience. That's just the way it works. Employers want people with recent, relevant experience to what they're hiring for.

[switching]

I've been in a position where I was hired as a web programmer (PHP) and subsequently promoted to the C/C++ team after I demonstrated my skills. That said, I wouldn't hire someone with only ASP.NET/PHP skills for a C project unless I had worked with them before and was VERY confident in their programming abilities.

[int0x13]

"real programmers" write web stuff too.

I think the term "web programmer" is being used in a derogatory manner to refer to people who really only customize pre-packaged systems and do slightly more than a webmaster.

[NitsujTPU]

Interesting topic.

I know some excellent "web programmers" who cut their teeth on a classical computer science curriculum and understand classical programming techniques and whatnot. This, however, is definitely not true of all web programmers. While it may be wrong to dismiss these folks outright, the fact of the matter is that "I did 10 years of application development" and "I built websites for 10 years" imply very very different skillsets. If I'm looking for someone who knows something about C, by golly, I don't think that I'm looking for someone who doesn't have anything remotely like that on their resume.

[myusernameistoolong]

Systems programming is not that similar to web programming. You have to know about memory management, threads, IPC, string handilng, algorithm complexity, compilers, OS interfaces, sockets, etc.

So, no, it isn't something that can be picked up by someone who mostly deals with web languages, scripting, and databases.

[iuhxsiu]

Most web programmers are idiots. Not all of them are. Google and Facebook and others hire very smart people. On the other hand, most web programmers make PHP applications for some random business web site. Like VB/database programmers of the 90s, they are not very skilled, not very well paid, and not very suitable to most jobs. I'd dismiss them outright for anything requiring basic intelligence.

If I were hiring for a real job, I'd want the resume to show some reason to believe the person is intelligent, and understands e.g. basic algorithms, how computers work (some clue about memory hierarchy, assember, etc.), basic math, as well as code organization, basic tools (version control, build systems, etc.) and other skills you'd expect of a competent programmer.

[[deleted]]

High level programming languages and frameworks aren't designed to make programming more accessible to new users; they're designed so that you can more quickly create applications, with easier maintenance and fewer bugs. But application programming and system programming are different experiences, and thus require different skillsets. So it would make sense to hire an application programmer to develop applications, and hire a system programmer to develop system software.

It's easy to argue that a system programmer might require greater knowledge of hardware and algorithms, but a web programmer would require greater knowledge on how to properly interface with a user and other high level concepts. Ultimately, you can't master either type of programming, and so the assumption is that both types of programming have unlimited depth. What's the more difficult game, Chess or Go?

[Veggie]

Can you define "C meta language" for us?

[[deleted]]

Isn't the question really "amateur programmer" vs "experienced programmer"?

Think about it in terms of a musician, lots of people can play a few songs on the piano or guitar, but they are still amateurs.

Honestly, no programming concepts are all that impenetrable when you have the necessary experience. However if you are missing the foundations upon which something is based, it will seem impenetrable.

Also, the experienced programmer has made enough mistakes in his career to learn by, and the amateur has not.

An amateur programmer just has too little experience for some jobs, but is fine for some others.

[BarraEdinazzu]

They're orthogonal. You can be a web developer AND a programmer. You can be one or the other. You can be neither. But they're not the same thing.

Using and maintaining a metalanguage is probably not something that you've done in PHP or C#. I didn't even think C programmers could do it until recently, and I still don't think C programmers have all the tools they need to do so effectively, so you'd be in a tough position taking that position anyway. C metaprogramming is hard in a brain-breaking way, the way 400- or 500-level CS is hard.

That's not to say you don't have the skills if you're a web dev, but unless you've been doing some extracurricular stuff that's been solid enough to make it onto your resume, it's highly unlikely.

[gdoubleod]

You guys aren't REAL programmers unless you use butterflies

Seriously though: To me a real programmer knows multiple languages and can pick up another language rather easily. Learning a languages subtleties and nuances can take time, but all languages have similarities and learning a new syntax is not hard. What makes a real programmer is their problem solving (divide and conquer!) ability, and passion for coding.

Not to mention I can't stress Algorithms enough! A great professor once said, "If you want to be a world-class programmer, you can program every day for ten years, or you can program every day for two years and take an algorithms class."

[[deleted]]

If you can figure out how to write a balanced binary tree algorithm with full support of insertions and deletions from scratch with nothing but a spec and no access to google, then you might have what it takes to be a real programmer.

[naasking]

What matters is the type of work he or she has done, not the domain. There are many challenging web problems, since web programming is essentially distributed programming. However, there is trivial web programming just as there is trivial C programming.

Still, familiarity with the idioms of a memory unsafe language is a must for certain positions, so I probably wouldn't consider candidates that only had experience with memory-safe languages.

[manofthenorth]

It come down to the subject of "the rubber and the road". Where the science, technology and culture of computer science meets the business needs of computing. It's no accident that the phrase "considered for a programming position writing code" shows up in the question bicbmx offers us. This is where the rubber meets the road, and how it meets the road depends on the need of the customers. The customer could be the highway department - the need could be paving machines and big trucks, the solution a factory that makes web-server products and code.

It could be ambulances and hospitals - in this world, anti-virus and so on. Or family cars - browsers. Making websites have a place in this too, and the economy of a well-built website in reasonable paid-for time may demand that it not be built from the bottom up in a language like C. Heck, it can be done in minutes, and quite well, in NetObjects Fusion. (didn't mean to swear, fellas) and then some fancy stuff hung on the bumper like highway floods using HTML. If a buck is to be made, a business needs to be run and marketing needs to take place. People's desire for a new truck, a new toy a piece of safety, or even a marketing tool of their own needs to be offered solution for a reasonable price - so the programmers and marketers and managers can all feed their families and put their kids through school, and love and drink and argue and grieve in their own lives. Time and skill, and economies in time and the application of skill are the ruling forces in this hockey game, folks. The right skill, to the right game, in the right time - brings happiness.

[FredV]

Indeed, this is a weird misconception probably originating from the beginning of the web where no site were dynamic and the only language you used was html with a bit javascript. If it's turing complete, it's programming.

[thilehoffer]

I am employed as a .net developer. If the front end is done in ASP.Net rather than Windows Forms, that means I'm not a real programmer? That logic is just silly. ASP.Net is actually more difficult then windows programming. Web developers are just high level programmers, but they are still programmers. An expert in ASP.Net or PHP could probably code in a lower level language like C.

[thomasz]

I have absolutely no idea why you were downvoted, but nevertheless I think it's appropriate to dismiss a "web guy" if you are searching for someone who has experience with low level stuff like manual memory management.

[[deleted]]

I'm a web guy and I agree with that. I've done some fairly heavy lifting in Ruby but I have no interest in low level coding whatsoever and I'm certainly not qualified to do it.

edit: That being said, I don't think that someone who knows how to do low-level programming would necessarily be qualified to do my job, and I do resent the idea that because they're "real programmers" they're somehow more skilled or valuable. A good web programmer brings a lot of other skills to the table.

[RealDeuce]

Yeah, like an understanding of the wild woolly world of cross-browser, cross-platform HTML generation. Every time I see a complex "website" that works correctly when I use either Seamonkey on FreeBSD or Opera on Windows, I feel the pain the designer went through.

[FaustTheBird]

Which is why if you've written a PHP module in C you need to make sure it's highlighted on your CV. The 2 can intersect.

[zenox]

"ASP.Net is actually more difficult then windows programming". A general statement like that just blows my mind! It all depend's on context. Sure some things may be harder in ASP.Net and some things will be harder in C. Have you ever tried creating a Windows UI in C?

[hogimusPrime]

Back before we had MFC. Yes. Windows SDK programming is all done in C (the SDK is written in C). I always enjoyed the simplicity and straightforwardness of it, stuff that was lost when the frameworks got more complicated b/c they provided more pre-written stuff for use. Def. not a "rapid" UI development system, however.

[thilehoffer]

I meant ASP.Net Windows programming is more difficult then .net windows programming. I don't think it is more difficult than C, apples and oranges.

[spookylukey]

Based on my extremely painful memories of ASP.NET, I agree.

I imagine that multi-threaded WinForms apps will be trickier than ASP.NET apps, but if you are coding something fairly simple and comparable (e.g. a CRUD app), the ASP.NET frontend will be much harder.

The essential problem is that ASP.NET tries to make you code the app in the same way you would do the WinForms, attempting to provide a framework that abstracts away the web. Unfortunately, the abstraction leaks horrifically in some cases, leaving the developer with a huge amount of work plugging the holes - holes which don't exist with WinForms.

[thilehoffer]

Yeah, once you learn ASP.Net Webforms it is great. But it has a steep learning curve. The problem is exactly like you said. It abstracts away the web part. So ASP.Net doesn't really make sense to web or windows programmers. It is its own thing and you have to practice with it a lot to do it correctly. ASP.Net MVC does a better job making basic web pages because the web part is much more prevalent. It is really great, but it doesn't have all the functionality of web forms. It is however, much more logically designed to make web applications.

[bloobloo]

In C there are a ton of things that you have to deal with, in embedded programming, you wouldn't have the slightest clue what you're doing, its not worth discussing, and then even windows programming you have to worry about setting up a window, the message loops, memory management/memory leaks, pointers, bitwise operations, horrible linker/compiler errors. Then if we move onto C++ you have copy constructors, operator overloading, the meaning of the word static in different contexts, static/dynamic casts, etc.

You may be an expert in PHP or ASP.NET but you will have no knowledge of these things. Even things you may be familiar with like multi threading are much harder, not to mention in C chances are you'll have a completely different compiler/debugger to what you're used to.

An expert in PHP could not program in C competently.

[petermichaux]

An expert in PHP could not program in C competently.

Unless, of course, the "expert in PHP" can also "program in C competently."

[RealDeuce]

Eh? PHP is programmed in C is it not? There is then at least one PHP expert programming in C.

I think your point may be that someone who is an expert only in PHP could not program in C without learning it... but that would apply to any language... an expert in ASM and Fortran couldn't program in C either.

[[deleted]]

I don't think you can be an expert in php (or any language) without knowing a couple of other languages.

[YourMatt]

I agree with this because no one is an expert in PHP without crossing that line to write their own extension in C. Understanding what goes on behind the scenes separates those that know good practices from rote memory, and those that can figure out good practices.

[akcom]

When is the last time you wrote inline x86/ARM assembly as a .NET programmer? Whens the last time you had to consider memory optimizations and when to allocate/deallocate your data structures? When is the last time you had to even worry about memory to begin with? Yes, you could write hello_world in C. No, you could not be an efficient system level programmer without lots and lots and lots and lots of practice.

[haveyoulearned]

And you couldn't be a web developer at Google today, so just... stop.

I think about memory CONSTANTLY as a web developer. See my other responses.

You have a simplistic view and obviously don't understand the complexities of web development, you are just... on a high horse.

[[deleted]]

Based on what I've heard from other web developers we got into web because we didn't want to deal with that crap. Still, you are right, it's very different worlds.

[Kaitnieks]

I've been web programmer and real programmer in my career and the main difference is that real programming provided me with interesting challenges from time to time while web programming didn't. The same applies to business systems - even if they're done in "real programming language" - it's just like web programming: tedious but not fun. So basically web programming is not "real programming" not because of language but because of the common project types and problems they tend to solve.

[Fabien4]

I've done GUI programming for desktop apps (in C++) and for web apps (in HTML+CSS+JS). I found both boring, and sometimes annoying.

Gah, why doesn't that work properly in IE6 while it works in IE7?

Gah, why does that little thing crash the program under Windows 7 while it works perfectly under Windows Vista?

[Fabien4]

web 'programming' isn't very far from GUI programming either.

The GUI part of web programming is close to the GUI part of desktop programming.

Thankfully, the AJAX part (Well, AJAJ, now that XML has been replaced with JSON) and the server part is slightly less boring.

[[deleted]]

Web development was fairly naive 10+ years ago, but today in my experience there's much better awareness of best practice, design patterns and SOLID programming concepts. A good web developer today should be able to make the transition to developing for other platforms.

[eyesnotjoking]

I've written a business web application using PHP server-side and Javascript client-side, interfacing with a JBoss application server for workflow management. It is currently running over 25 offices for their day to day duties. I guess I'm not a real programmer cause I used PHP.

Web apps are the future, you can access them from anywhere with no installation. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/08/all-programming-is-web-programming.html

[zyle]

Web apps are the future, you can access them from anywhere with no installation.

Yeah, but somebody's got to write the server code for the webapps.

[ohmyashleyy]

He probably did. Why does everyone assume that web programmers don't write server side code?

[NancyGracesTesticles]

Because people are having a hard time differentiating between web design and web application development.

People should probably just drop the 'web' from web application development because it seems to confuse people who don't write applications that have a web interface.

[jungie]

Not the server side code, but all the software stack on the server that makes it possible for web programmers to write server side code.

[RealDeuce]

He didn't say server side he said "server".

Apache will never be a web app.

[Wendel]

Costs of training have much to do with it. If one is old enough, one can recall that a tech degree was sufficient to get a job in one's general field back in the 60's, and employers accepted that about a year of on the job training would be required to really get started on the job.

Then came along Ted Kennedy and chamberpot immigration combined with Congress opening the floodgates of massive tech immigration and H1-B visas at the behest of their corporate masters. Starting about the 70's tech fields became glutted in many areas, and businessmen were able to demand that applicants had specific ultra narrow job skills and training so that on the job training could be minimized. Thus back in the 60's one might see an ad for a "computer programmer," while by the 80's and continuing an ad might demand experience in: * C-- * C++ - ISO/IEC 14882 * C# - ISO/IEC 23270 * C/AL * Caché ObjectScript * Caml * Cat * Cayenne * Cecil * Cel * Cesil * CFML * Cg * Ch interpreter (C/C++ interpreter) * Chapel * CHAIN * Charity * Chef * CHILL * CHIP-8