Programming vs Web Development: What’s the Difference?

Web development can be taken as a subset of programming, as programming is a more vast term. In reality, web developers are programmers. But not necessarily every programmer is a web developer.

Here is some light on both programming and web development and their differences.

Programming is the process of writing a computer program. A program is a small piece of software that executes some certain predefined logic to get the required result. Programming is done in web development too but is not limited to the web. Programming is done in developing any software or web application. The logic part of an application or software is handled by programming.

Programming can be done using various technologies and languages. The person who writes any kind of program is usually referred to as a Programmer.

Web development, on the other hand, is limited to web applications (which run in the browser). Web development encompasses the whole process of creating any kind of web application, this could include a website, blog, E-shop, or any custom web platform. Web designing also comes under the web development umbrella but mostly web development focuses on the core logic and integration of your web application or platform. The people who carry out web development are referred to as web developers. And anyone can become a web developer by learning online and getting web developer certifications.

There are many differences between programming and web development even within the web scope. Here are a few major differences

Major Differences between Programming Vs Web Development

• Programming and Web development, both involve coding. Web development is a bit different term than programming and it can be divided into two terms:
1) front-end (client-side)
2) back-end (server-side) programming
Similar to these programming types, programmers are divided into front-end and back-end programmers.
• In web development, developers mostly have more than one particular programming skill set. There are full-stack developers who will have both back-end and front-end skills. Mostly front-end developers have ample of UI and web designing skills.
• Web development’s main focus is web content creation along with custom designing and development approach. Bigger companies focus on creating their own websites or web platforms from scratch (so that they are not dependent on any development tools).
• Programming’s main focus is getting the logic right. And handling users actions and outcomes for those actions.
• Programming is not limited to web development. Programming is found throughout all fields of technology, not just web development.
• Programming is more widespread than web development, and only a particular type of programming (ie; web programming) is catered in the case of web development.

Technical Differences

While both Programmers and web developers write code. Their focuses as mentioned above are quite different. Programming generally handles the logic of creation and the term Programming is very vast.

Programming can be done on any platform be it web or desktop application its just the logic process that we term as programming. Web development is rather more focused on the development of websites and you can easily hire some web developers here.

Let’s take a web designer, for example, the designer makes a mockup of a website and plans how the website will look and feel. The designer only provides an initial design for what is to be made. The Web developer is the one who implements this design to some extent. The programmer comes into play to create some new features or tools that help in the usability of the website. Generally, once the programmer’s work is done then the web developer looks after the maintenance.

The professional roles are what sets the web developer and programmers apart, A programmer is usually asked to improve the current standard of software or implement some new key features and functionalities.

In reality, anyone who programs can be called a programmer. The debate of including and excluding people from this category is endless. But generally, the people who can write a small piece of program to handle somewhat complex logic like a macro on a spreadsheet can be termed as a programmer.

A web developer is also a programmer who can create web-based applications. All web developers thus know how to program using web-based programming languages. Hence, a web developer is also a programmer, but any programmer might not necessarily be a web developer.

Mostly, a web developer knows languages HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. These are called front-end (client side) or scripting languages.
They would also know some back end (server side) languages like PHP, ASP.net, Java, Python, NodeJS, etc.

In addition to this web developers might also know some databases languages like (SQL) to create databases and perform CRUD operations on them. Some commonly used databases for the web include MySql, PostgreSQL, Oracle, etc.

There are hundreds of programming languages and more being created every day. A programmer who is not a web developer can know one or more of these languages. Most of the modern languages out there today have a web (API) interface to create web apps.

As discussed majority of web developers are programmers (but not all). Some web developers only use HTML and CSS to carry out 90% of their web designing need, this helps them do things like maintaining and updating the content, and these people can be called web designers but not programmers.

Besides this, there is not really any difference between a web developer and a programmer. Both carry out the same kind of work, both write code. Web developer writes code for the web and a programmer writes code for desktop software or applications.

Conclusion

Overall If you can write programs (small chunks of code to get some logical result), then you are a programmer.

Whereas, if you can develop websites (for which some programming is necessary) then you are a web developer.

Both go hand in hand in the field of web development, but the word programmer alone does not specify as to which field this individual relates. Whether he/she is a web programmer or a desktop based Java or C++ programmer or a python programmer. As all are the subsets of programming.