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Comment by seren | Hacker News Reader

As a non web developer I am fairly surprised that about 50% of developers are "web developers".

Is this the distribution in the global developer population as well ? Or is this a bias due to Stackoverflow which by its very nature is web centric ?

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I see it kind of like this: 10 years ago when I had my first official job post college we needed some tools for interacting with our manufacturing data sets. I opened up Visual Studio and created some Windows applications and installers.

Then we deployed a web service written in Java (because at the time any web server we had was *nix) to create some additional functionality and hooked the desktop apps up to it.

Then we swapped out the desktop apps because too many people were not upgrading and getting all kinds of errors. Or desktop support was getting too many calls because the end user had a borked environment.

This was all many moons ago and happened in the span of 18 months.

I started out as a desktop and server API application developer. Today I haven't written an exe since I left that job but to build UIs over the years I had to learn HTML/CSS/JS. That is, I feel, we got the 'original' full stack developer.

I have no doubt that the web will eat desktop application (maybe native app as well at some point).

However, they are plenty fields from machine learning, to robotics that are also likely on the rise that would require some SW development skills.

Also, as mentioned by d0lph, I believe the high churn in web technology makes more people relying on SO, compared to let's say someone coding in C99.

But my view is probably skewed by working in embedded SW.

The thing is, with the ML code or the code for robotics that I've written over years, it's been predicated on the fundamentals of software development I've learned doing everything else. Good habits are good habits, disorganized code is disorganized code.

In some ways all the C/C++ I've written for my various robots and gadgets have been easier than even web development UI code because my button is LITERALLY a button, my screen resolution is a 2 row LCD, and I'm designing the system my code will run in. Don't get me wrong, I'm half kidding, but my point is that a good developer is a good developer in whatever area of development they want to work in.

You take a good web app developer and move them in to robotics, they'll be good quickly. At first they're obviously not as familiar with the domain, so there is a curve. But they will get strong eventually- assuming the EE side of things doesn't drive them away.

I agree with your point. When I said "development skills" it was not a judgement about talent, rather about "body count".

Ah, that makes sense and I definitely agree. The ability to write code in a decently maintainable fashion will certainly be necessary in fields that it wasn't and new fields entirely.

The upside for people that do this, as I alluded to, is that if you have these skills and want to do a new thing in a new field, it's an option. Things like SO will help you play with the new thing in the new field where you might otherwise not have any help.

>I have no doubt that the web will eat desktop application

I hope not.

There's nothing like a well-done desktop GUI EXE for richness of UI / UX. And desktop GUI apps can still connect to back-end services over HTTP or other technologies.

>I have no doubt that the web will eat desktop application

Both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates disagree with you[1].

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wvhW8cp15tk

In 2007. Everything changes, it's our only constant.

What has changed in the limitations of the DOM?

Quite a bit, actually. Since 2007, we've gotten Javascript JITs, Canvas, WebGL, consistent box models, consistent event models, flexbox, CSS transitions & animations, CSS transforms, localstorage, IndexedDB, websockets, HTML5 audio & video, history.pushState, and several other features. And components (custom elements + Shadow DOM) are coming, and already implemented in some browsers.

Pretty much anything you could do in a native Windows app in 2007, you can do in a webapp now, except pwn your computer. Only problem is that the goalposts have moved: now everybody expects you to be able to do it on a phone as well, as well as access the camera, accelerometer (which you can do on the web, actually), contacts, calendar, and bluetooth hardware.

Uhm... the DOM is single threaded and sequential. It will never EVER be comparable to native clients.

Web Workers.

Yeah man. I've never heard of those. They sound like the best thing since sliced bread. Only if they could access the DOM...

Seriously... what are you even talking about? Why do you even mention them? You read single threaded and thought "Quick, I must come up with an answer! I can't let a stranger on the Internet change my opinion!"?

So, it's hard to understand exactly what it is you're trying to accomplish and why Web Workers wouldn't work for you because basically every single desktop GUI framework is single-threaded when it comes to actually updating the components on the screen. Win32 uses the GetMessage/TranslateMessage/DispatchMessage event loop. Swing has the UI thread, and then to update the UI from a background thread, you need to call invokeAndWait or invokeLater and pass a Runnable. Cocoa and iOS have Grand Central Dispatch, and to update the UI you pass a block to dispatch_async on a dispatch queue. Android has you call View.post() with a Runnable that contains your UI modifications. WPF has two threads, a rendering one and a UI thread, and you're supposed to pass long-running operations off to a threadpool and then call Invoke or BeginInvoke with a delegate to actually update the UI from them.

Web Workers are exactly this model, applied to the web. It's a dispatch queue running inside a threadpool. To update the DOM, you postMessage back to the UI thread and make your modifications there.

Are you willing to let a stranger on the Internet change your opinion?

This is getting tiresome. You cannot access key objects with webworkers. It's a lipstick on a pig. If you want to kiss it, be my guess, but please do not try misguide other people to do so.

Perhaps not in the limitations of the DOM, but how we deal with it is changing.

Their arguments are just as valid as then. Web interfaces will never be as rich as desktop ones. Cloud connected desktop applications will gain a lot of momentum going forward.

Right, roughly what I said in a parallel comment. Good to see others think so too.

Biased towards users of StackOverflow, not developers in general. Unless you believe the population of developers who took the survey is representative of the entire world of software developers--I'd be willing to bet it's not.

Yep, StackOverflow tends to be a ghost town on non-web-related technologies, and basic programming language contructs/techniques - and those are heavily weighted towards Ruby/Java/C#/Python, where the questions are not necessarily about web dev, but you can tell the questioner is working on the back-end of a web app.

Right.

Web is where the new stuff is happening, if you see a new framework or library 90% of the time it is some JS/browser based language. Thus this leads to a larger online community of people trying to make stuff work, and in the end more SO users.

Not to mention web apps being the new big thing.

To further that I think a lot of devs that tinker with things outside of work tend to tinker with web stuff more.

Web is where the new stuff was happening. The browser is very constrained - most of the 'new' stuff is to get around the browser shortcomings - e.g. react, angular. These are to solve front end problems that have been long solved on desktop environments (.Net, Delphi, VB maybe even Obj C though I'm not a fan)

Actual new tech is in the mobile sphere now imho, or server side AI, very little of this is web development except for the occasional front end for said apps.

As a former desktop developer, current web developer I think WebAssembly has a decent shot at changing that.

The tools I use now are significantly more crude in the business domain/for line of business stuff than I was using in the days of Delph 5.

Personally, give me something that can run Qt (or something like it) and Python in the browser and I'm 95% to been in heaven.

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