Web developers, I'll let you in on a secret. I know you've never heard this outside of your small circle of friends. It'll probably come as a shock.
Programming is not a subset of web development. It is possible to write programs that are not part of a website.
I know you won't believe me.
Today's award for "Headline I'd Never Write" goes to this gem:
What Every Programmer Should Know About SEO
No, I didn't read the article. The answer is "absolutely nothing". I'm not about to read something written by someone who worked his way through a Ruby on Rails tutorial and thinks he can tell me something interesting. Why not "What Every Shoe Salesman Should Know About SEO"? When you write R and Fortran code most of the day, SEO is just as relevant.
I don't even see why every web developer should be concerned about SEO. I
know some folks who work on complicated web apps, but it wouldn't be
very helpful for their work to know anything about SEO, because that's
not their department.
Not that I haven't seen similar many, many times before. I can't find the link, but there was a blog post a few months ago that said Scala and Clojure have nothing to offer because all programmers are web developers and web developers don't need to worry about concurrency.
Yeah. I'm a programmer. I did web development when it was programming. Now that it's turned into template engines, I've gone back to programming....
ReplyDeleteThanks for the laugh.
ReplyDeleteI don't know enough about the state of web development to know if you're serious.
It isn't often that you see people online arguing that a subject isn't important and that programmers, a crew who are reknowned for their love of learning are better off not knowing about it.
ReplyDeletelewiscromwell: He never said "better off not knowing", or anything equivalent to it.
ReplyDeleteAnd I don't know that programmers are "reknowned for their love of learning" (sic), but the field by its nature is certainly renowned for attention to detail and understanding of logic, so yours seems a rather strange claim to make. Can you not see the difference between "not better off" and "better off not"?