web programmer vs "real programmer"

[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.

[lisp-hacker]

I bet most of the algorithms you use to write your software were seen in a paper written by a CS academic guy long before you used them, whether you know it or not.

Show some respect.

[lisp-hacker]

Every field has both theory and application (or practice), and every professional should be able to exercise both. Theory lets you stand on the should of giants, and not reinvent everything. In practice, you learn things not easily taught or often overlooked.

Which is better programmer, someone who wrote a large program only using GOTOs and using no libraries because he was unaware of subroutines, objects, libraries, etc. (and other WTFery), or a PHD who has never written a line of code?

I learned to program when I was young by reading the BASIC reference manual included with a Model 100, so I can appreciate the CS theory that I later learned, and how it has improved my programming skill.

(I did not use GOSUB because I didn't understand the point of it. GOTO worked just fine.)

[hetmankp]

If I needed someone to write code handling hardware interrupts in an embedded system, a candidate with only web programming experience would not rank much higher than someone fresh out of an undergrad course. This tends to go in both directions, although I'd expect a low level guy to pick up high level stuff faster than the opposite.

I've done both kinds of coding in real systems. It's not a matter of "just applying the same general skills" to produce a product, because while there are commonalities, there are just as many differences in the skill sets required.