Programming vs Web Programming

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Every now and then I get a spare 5minutes to catch u with a few of my favourite blogs. I haven't researched into many, but have been either referred to by close industry colleagues, or simple stumbled across by accident.

Once such stumble is the Coding Horror blog, written by a chap called Jeff Atwood. The whole Coding Horror blog has its own widget for your iGoogle account and makes a compelling read.

One of its most recent posts in a reaction to a blog post by a Microsoft engineer called Michael Braude, in which he claims that the reason most people want to program for the web is that they're not smart enough to do anything else. Like Jeff this got my back up, I am by no means MENSA material, but equally I am not stupid.

I openly criticise the software that the people at Microsoft provide the world wide web to which I have t deploy work on. So it will come as no surprise that I, like Jeff have taken great exception and anger towards the blog post. I am not totally anti Microsoft, like most programmers of my age, I was brought up on a PC, my first machine was a 'top of the range' PC with Windows 95, and I loved it. Nowadays I run both Mac and PC at home, my trusty Dell is older than my kids and still going strong with Windows XP, and I have only ever replaced the monitor on it. This is not a rant against Microsoft, this is a defence of my trade and the good people working in the industry to produce good quality websites.

I will not try and argue to case of who is the smartest, web programmers or software programmers, I believe both professions, like all professions  whether it be plumbers, politicians or policemen there are people who have a positive effect, and people who have an equally negative effect, I think in a round about way Michael's opinion of web programmers has been swayed as there are simply more of us than software engineers, and therefore my opportunity to have the bad eggs in our ranks.

The question Michael has to ask himself when he questions intelligence, is why if the software programmers (in particular those like himself at Microsoft) are so great why are some many applications so bad – web programmers spend half there day fixing problems that the the 'wonderful' Internet Explorer throws up.

So come on Michael, MR IQ, Mr I am Superior, write a good browser and put your money where you mouth is!

***** UPDATE ******

Since he wrote the original post Michael has backed tracked slightly after Jeff posted with such a tirade, he correctly points out the omissions that Jeff made, but then continues to back his claims up, evidently and undisputedly software engineering far outdates web programming, but yet in that whole 40 years not one software developer for a main stream operating system or desktop application has produced a system that is 100% reliable, that doesn't crash un expectably, that doesn't randomly slow to a crawl, in 40 years exactly what have they achieved apart from pushing the envelope and glossing over the cracks of the buggy past. Microsoft Bob, or Windows ME anyone??