Like it’s been said in earlier posts, when the coder/designer role can be decoupled, a well staffed project that works together will balance out. When a shaky economy or poor company performance got the better of the highest execs, I’ve seen more top rate ‘pure’ designers get cut, outsourced, or deemed redundant than mediocre to midrange coders (since many or most coders possess skills that can perform or appeal to numerous roles/groups/units)

As for the nyt, the father inlaw just recently retired from his post as an ad trafficker and after hearing his stories of Mac, PC, and the fumbling around when interoperability was required, this headline made him both laugh and grimace.

Meh, go to bed, I’ll call you if it turns ugly.

*imagining what coders turning ugly might look like*

..not much different – ZING! :p

All these modern day IDE’s are for pussies. Take your Eclipse plugins and plug them where the sun ain’t shining.

Wow, it’s only 10% crappy code now? Sign me up!

Seriously people, WYSIWYG tools – even if one did exist that made good code – are SLOWER than hand coding in the long run. This is because an experienced coder creates self-documenting code designed for easy maintenance. From the names of variables/classes/id’s to a flexible structure that can easily be modified to fit potential design changes, hand coding is superior for all but the simplest projects. And even for those, I would only recommend WYSIWYG for people who will not be doing this for a living, like my grandma.

Ever tried to make manual modifications to something generated by a WYSIWYG? Try it someday, you will wish you were never born.

Obviously Mac vs PC is a retarded point to bring into this discussion.

Are the tools really this bad? Maybe we’re really just stuck in the 80s.

Oh, but I did. See comment #45.

zeros and ones on blank paper? boh! Everybody knows real programmers use butterflies!

http://www.xkcd.org/378/

Yeah, I’m a coder…

I fricken’ knew it! LOL ; )

99% of designers simply can’t code.

I assume you are only using 99% as an expression, I would hope, but anyway…

Designers who can’t code at all, not even simple HTML? I’d say only around 10-30%

Designers who can code simple HTML? I’d say around 65-80%
Actually, many kids in public school are taught basic HTML skills nowadays.

Designers that are great with advanced coding beyond standard HTML? Probably only 20 to 30 percent, if that?

But, I think you missed my point… a high percentage of designers KNOW when they can’t code too well and don’t try to play it off and will hand it off to a coder.

A bad design will go up from a decent coder and at least “function” to some degree and they can fool themselves into thinking it’s great. On the other hand, bad code from a decent desiger will often break the site’s functionality in some way that’s more obvious to any lay-person.

I guess it’s just easier for coders to fool themselves into thinking they are great designers. That’s why that happens more often.

And I’m not talking about some html… Any serious web development nowadays include databases, web services, etc…

Well, you DO know that Dreamweaver will generate pages for you in PHP, ASP, JSP, CFM, etc., etc, etc. and will even let you set up a test server, etc.?

Well, anyway…. I’ll just say this:

The best coders are the ones that respect the importance and skill of design and (natch) the best designers respect the importance and skill of proper code.

Experience: boss assigns web page development task, perform task using text editor, other employee uses DW, time wasted developing page.

Are the tools really this bad? Maybe we’re really just stuck in the 80s.

In my experience, the tools were that bad.

I don’t think you can use that excuse any more though, at least with Dreamweaver, as it’s leaps and bounds better than it was years ago.

While my experience with compilers is limited, I wouldn’t be surprised that they, in general, had some growing pains as well.

“Well, you DO know that Dreamweaver will generate pages for you in PHP, ASP, JSP, CFM, etc., etc, etc. and will even let you set up a test server, etc.?”

yeah, I know, as eclipse and other IDEs do, too… but you have to WRITE it. To write some php script in DW isn’t different to write it in eclipse. That’s what I said before: You could use DW, but if you want to do something profesional you have to do it as text-editor-on-steroids. I mean, html, as you said, can be written even by schoolkids. The hard part of a web development use to be the functionality, not presentation. And that’s php, asp, ruby or whatever you use, not html. And how many designers know how to do this? Very few. We are talking about complex programs here, not about something you could generate selecting some options in a wizard. We are not talking about setting a form with a couple of links and images, but about object orientation, php classes and AJAX. And you couldn’t skip to handwrite this kind of stuff.

And about designers-programmers issue… it’s just the opposite, again: If a coder do both things the worst case it’s that you end with a horrible looking but functional site. Maybe the menus are wrong placed, but you after a while trying to figuring how it works, you can use it. But when a designer do both things, the worst case is that you end with a non-functional site. I find everyday beautiful designed sites that simply doesn’t run on opera, because the designer used that little javascript code that only works on IE. Or even more trivial programming errors…

Designers that think they are coders are bad.
Coders who think they are designers are worse.

This is both clever and counter-intuitive.. It makes you not rely on the computer/highlighting to jog ur memory, and makes you understand rather than memorize..

But it also doesn’t take into account that all but the most hardcore programmers don’t memorize all the codes they will ever need, and will either reference books or google regularly.

It isn’t remembering codes that makes a programmer, it’s understanding syntax and knowing how to break down a task into useful chunks.

I can’t believe that this is a real story. Is this some follow up to ‘Untitled 1′?

I work for a large digital company that produces websites and I don’t think there is any developer in our team of 30 that doesn’t “hand code”.

Your OS sucks, your text editor sucks, your pet sucks, and your political candidate sucks. Does that cover all the major flamewars? Can we move on?

Weas @ 56 nails it, by the way. (I started recounting that comic to my advisor, who broke in to say “Obviously real programmers use emacs!” before I’d even gotten to the emacs part. It is a good thing advisor and I agree on text editors, or there might be bloodshed in the lab.)

Also, my boyfriend the web designer prototypes with GUI tools and actually builds the thing by hand. Also, CSS FTW. (And, if the amount of curse words emanating from his office is any guide, Internet Explorer FTL.)

(only joking, Every company I’ve worked for in eight years has hand coded)

Have to agree with all the comments above.

12-year-olds can remember complex key combos for video games with ease.

So it’s not really hand-code vs. wysiwyg-code, it’s hand-code vs. choose the story from a menu and click the publish button.

Funny article . . .

Hand-coding, abolutely. In Dreamweaver. With all kinds of AJAX trickery, PHP, Flash, whatever the WYSIWYG view is pretty useles anyhow.

Edit, ctrl-shift-U, alt-tab to ‘fox, F5, ctrl-tab to IETab, F5, sigh, alt-tab, repeat.

…they stopped using calculators to check their math because it’s better to do it all by hand.

They may only imagine they are getting things done faster that way, but man… it’s got so much more soul. LOL