The Difference Between Webmasters and Programmers
An average user will just view and go to your website, use the programs, and play the games that you’ve written. But they don’t see or even care about the grueling process you have to go through to write them.
Programming is about knowing if not mastering tens of languages so they could instruct the computer to do things. Up to this, web design and programming doesn’t conflict the idea.
However, what programming stands for is telling the computer to do something using a language like C++ to communicate with the computer, since the computer is just a dumb crappy thing that only understands 0 and 1.
Web coding also uses a language called HTML or Hypertext Markup Language, which is also a set of instructions that can be understood in human language.
While that applies to both, coding for the web only uses the language to “interact with the browser, ” and no actual compiling or interpreting is done. In logic, you do not tell the computer what to do; instead, you tell the browser what to do, and then the browser tells the computer what to do.
In plain, understandable English, I meant: programming is harder than creating websites “from scratch” which is already hard.
Down the road, it gets easier as you learn several languages since all of them does the same thing. Let’s take a conditional statement as an example;
In Visual Basic, it is;
if…then…else…end if
In C++, that is;
if(condition){code to execute}else{code to execute}
Plus some variations from earlier versions and different languages.
But the logic stays that same that it’s a conditional statement similarly “if the condition isn’t met, you do this, or else you do that.”
This article’s purpose is only to explain why web designers aren’t programmers, and not even be an introduction to programming. If it is a comfort, you can Google C++or Visual Basic tutorials to find places where you can learn programming.