Programming vs Web Development

No doubt others have commented on this before, but it seems that web development and programming aren't the same thing.

The last two days I built a few simple Rails applications. The second one is relatively impressive ( a blogger site with authentication, image uploading, tagging and commenting). While I learned a great deal about MVC, Rails and even some new features of Git, I learned little programming.

Most of the problems I encountered had to do with gem version incompatibilities. I had to update this, rollback that, edit the Gemfile, precompile for Heroku deployment, reset the database, reset Heroku, etc. Most of the problems were solved through brute force trial and error and googling. The final product was impressive, but Rails did most of the programming for me.

Previous exercises involving Project Euler, writing sort algorithms or programs to solve mechanics problems in Physics, required deep thought and abstraction.

No doubt problem solving (in the sense of creating a program vs troubleshooting) will be a part of my web development studies, but at the moment I sense my programming abilities getting flabby.

To prevent flab, I have set myself daily workouts in at least 2 languages (the choices being Java, Javascript and Ruby). This morning I wrote a nice little program to input, manipulate and extract data from an array in Java (for the Initiation a la programmation course on Coursera).

It was fun.

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