DEV Community

Cover image for Programming vs Web Development

Programming vs Web Development

Emmanuelbinen on April 01, 2024

Have you ever wondered what sets web development apart from traditional programming? In this post, I will share with you my personal experience wh...
Collapse
 
efpage profile image
Eckehard

Building a car and driving a car is also a very different task. I was always wandering, why so many webdev´s are using VScode. It is like they are trying to win a formula one race, but instead of a steering wheel they use a wrench.

Collapse
 
noblica profile image
Dušan Perković

What do you think should be used instead of VSCode?

Collapse
 
efpage profile image
Eckehard

What do you think the Mona Lisa would look like, if the only tool Leonardo Da Vinci had used was VSCode?

Thread Thread
 
noblica profile image
Dušan Perković

The Mona Lisa is a painting and VSCode is a text editor, what are you talking about?

Thread Thread
 
efpage profile image
Eckehard

Today, websites are more sophisticated graphic artworks with dynamic effects than simple text documents, so why do we use text editors to build them?

Thread Thread
 
noblica profile image
Dušan Perković

Hence the question I asked above: What do you think should be used instead of VSCode?

I disagree on websites being artworks though. They can be very pretty, and accessible, but that doesn't make all websites we build today works of art.

Collapse
 
rcls profile image
OssiDev

So backend development is programming while frontend is web development?

Collapse
 
firecrow8 profile image
Firecrow Silvernight

I think every territory has a little extra. I'd say Map/Reduce is "programming + consolidation + calculation", in the same way WebDev is "programming + layouts + user-interaction".

It's not a sub-set, it's s super-set.

Collapse
 
katafrakt profile image
Paweł Świątkowski

That seems to be a common notion here on Dev but also on the internet in general: webdev = FE

Collapse
 
firecrow8 profile image
Firecrow Silvernight

Great article, I've also found that web development as well as mobile, and most other UI based layers of an application, have a few patterns that are not as common in other areas of an application.

It's not just the introduction of design to me, it's because there is no control on the order of events, and the need to respond to a changing interface, requires a different way of organizing the system.

Most server processes have a handle on when it starts and ends, user-interface work is far more cyclical and responsive.

Great read, thanks for writing it.

Collapse
 
bcostaaa01 profile image
Bruno

That “vs” in the title, and the thematic of the article is rubbing me off a tad for some reason 😅 without programming, you aren’t able to do web development, unless you use no-code tools, imo. It’s not like “what came first? The egg, or the chicken?” 😂 visual design skills, yeah, but it still is programming in its core foundation.

Collapse
 
soulpimp profile image
Craig

Yes and no, I think code fundamentals are at play for sure, but writing frontend code compared to backend or server side isn't nearly as structured in the implementation of those methodologies. Java is much more structured than JavaScript or Typescript, CSS has almost no recognizable fundamental structure to say C or .net other than it is using object syntax. I'd say the core foundation of code is the root language and then web development is a dialect that is derived from that root syntax.

Collapse
 
firminfinva profile image
firminfinva

Thanks for this article. it is like a wake-up call for me.

Collapse
 
sreno77 profile image
Scott Reno

Web Dev is programming just like App Dev is programming.

Collapse
 
nicholasbalette profile image
Nicholasbalette

What an experience you go ,thanks for sharing lessons learned.

Collapse
 
afortiori profile image
Ayo

Apart from Vs code, you can use Sublime Text as your text editor for web development.

Sublime