The programming industry walks around in circles and there is no beacon in this darkness of ignorance.
There is no professional culture and new generations of developers successfully forget all the experience previous generations have accumulated.
Also, some piece of advice from a seasoned programmer to the web-programming-children: if you are not really a serious developer, if you write your freaking websitee on Django, or whatever a framework there is, you don't really need a methodology, because you are doing an easy task, you can write in whatever language/style/paradigm you like, even on Brainfuck. But please don't extrapolate your humble experience to the entire industry and don't tell people working on large complicated (real) projects how they must write code, because they have some experience you don't have.
Because programmers who happen to implement complex, huge, real systems that happen to interface users via a browser are of course less of a "real" programmers then the ones who happen to implement rather straightforward, but native, CRUD interfaces to some legacy DB.
Wait, what?
"Domain pissing match"? Or just inexperience in and misconceptions about writing web apps on your part?
Anyway, that's irrelevant - the advice here is not specific to web programming at all and is a sound one, no matter how experienced you are or what you work on at the moment. Writing modular, reusable and easily customisable code is just a good idea.
Heh, what am I doing. It's still early for me and I'm responding to an obvious trolling attempt from frustrated Java programmer who uses the word "humble" without a shred of humility in his own writing. I should just stop and try porting this "freaking website on Django" that my team has been working on for the last three years to Brainfuck - I'd be more productive that way and I guess it would be more fun, too.
> But please don't extrapolate your humble experience to the entire industry and don't tell people working on large complicated (real) projects how they must write code, because they have some experience you don't have.
Don't take this the wrong way, I mostly agree with your points regarding the missing "professional culture" among us programmers, just yesterday I sent an email out to our internal list urging my coworkers not to use one-letter variables anymore and explaining to them why that is bad, but when it comes to web projects somehow not being "real" programming I'm afraid you're wrong.
It is true, some momentum was lost when the "open-data" mantra that was flying in the air around 2004-2005 gave way to today's walled gardens and one-page AJAXy apps, but there are still interesting things happening on the web.
Don't you think writing about it is a good to minimize the amount forgotten generation to generation? Even if they write something that is flat out wrong, someone will probably tell them and everyone might learn. Also I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss building websites on Django (or any other framework) as easy. I imagine many things are easier, but I bet many things are harder as well, I'd think you'd be surprised at how quickly "good" designs go to shit when business requirements change every two weeks and how this effects development.
There is no professional culture and new generations of developers successfully forget all the experience previous generations have accumulated.
Also, some piece of advice from a seasoned programmer to the web-programming-children: if you are not really a serious developer, if you write your freaking websitee on Django, or whatever a framework there is, you don't really need a methodology, because you are doing an easy task, you can write in whatever language/style/paradigm you like, even on Brainfuck. But please don't extrapolate your humble experience to the entire industry and don't tell people working on large complicated (real) projects how they must write code, because they have some experience you don't have.