All Programming is Web Programming

[urlwolf]

Atwood at his best:

Computer Science spent the last forty years making languages which were as powerful as possible. Nowadays we have to appreciate the reasons for picking not the most powerful solution but the least powerful. The less powerful the language, the more you can do with the data stored in that language. If you write it in a simple declarative from, anyone can write a program to analyze it. If, for example, a web page with weather data has RDF describing that data, a user can retrieve it as a table, perhaps average it, plot it, deduce things from it in combination with other information. At the other end of the scale is the weather information portrayed by the cunning Java applet. While this might allow a very cool user interface, it cannot be analyzed at all. The search engine finding the page will have no idea of what the data is or what it is about. The only way to find out what a Java applet means is to set it running in front of a person.

I agree, give me data in plain formats I can use rather than fancy interfaces anyday. Ideally both. This is why the unix ideals (everything is a file; config by editing files, etc) are still working.

Pretty soon, all programming will be web programming. If you don't think that's a cause for celebration for the average working programmer, then maybe you should find another profession.

[housetier]

I prefer (programming) web interfaces over graphical interfaces. It is just more portable, platform-independent, and whatnot.

Also I know much more about HTML than about qt, gtk, winforms, or whatever widget set is out there.

Of course, with javascript on the rise, more "powerful" web applications will be created, which will, in turn, bring some of the complexity to the web. However, I think this is not so much a problem because HTML is scalable: you can make do without the "power" of the gui.