I'd speculate you just don't know it as well as you know web programming.
My background is in systems programming and low level stuff; I've only been a web-programmer for two years.
I agree with your points; all those technologies are not perfect. Their limitations are mostly the result of unexpected explosive growth (the 640kb barrier, depletion of the IP address space, etc.) But they feel soundly engineered overall.
I just don't get the same feeling working with the web-related things (browsers, JS, AJAX, CSS, cross-domain policies and hacks to bypass them, etc, etc.). They all feel ad-hoc and it shows in the codebase I have to work with nowadays: it's often ugly, buggy and hard to maintain.
As a systems programmer, I've been amazed by the ingenuity of things like process forking, pipes, the proc file system, regular expressions, lexer and parser generators (the list goes on). But I can't remember a single web-related technology that made my jaw drop in amazement.
And I don't even want to get started on the difference in the quality standards and average mindset of hardware/OS design and web development (the whole "agile" and "extreme" programming thing and such).
The 'feel' so because you are made to believe so. We haven't seen anything else better in comparison. But those who have, talk about it.
>>As a systems programmer, I've been amazed by the ingenuity of things like process forking, pipes, the proc file system, regular expressions, lexer and parser generators (the list goes on). But I can't remember a single web-related technology that made my jaw drop in amazement.
Web means? Back end engineering is very much a part of the web. And the most of the things that you talk of like Parsing, regular expressions, pipes et al are all there in languages like Perl.
Perl is known as a the swiss army knife of the Internet.
Jaw-dropping for the wrong reasons IMO. Reinventing the virtual machine poorly in a web browser is an impressive feat given the technical limitations but what does that actually prove? The demoscene is far more impressive in that regard.
My background is in systems programming and low level stuff; I've only been a web-programmer for two years.
I agree with your points; all those technologies are not perfect. Their limitations are mostly the result of unexpected explosive growth (the 640kb barrier, depletion of the IP address space, etc.) But they feel soundly engineered overall.
I just don't get the same feeling working with the web-related things (browsers, JS, AJAX, CSS, cross-domain policies and hacks to bypass them, etc, etc.). They all feel ad-hoc and it shows in the codebase I have to work with nowadays: it's often ugly, buggy and hard to maintain.
As a systems programmer, I've been amazed by the ingenuity of things like process forking, pipes, the proc file system, regular expressions, lexer and parser generators (the list goes on). But I can't remember a single web-related technology that made my jaw drop in amazement.
And I don't even want to get started on the difference in the quality standards and average mindset of hardware/OS design and web development (the whole "agile" and "extreme" programming thing and such).