" I'm sorry but the majority of what's called web development is writing WordPress themes or Drupal modules, and most of this work is leveraging some API in tedious and uninteresting ways. Create this content type, do this when you save it, make this form, validate it like that, blah blah. "
You're correct that lots of web development is simple. However, a very large assemblage of simple components is not simple, and lots of web apps are very large. For example: one of the first web projects I worked on was a game written in PHP and MySQL. At first, it went much faster than expected, as writing a basic CRUD app in PHP is very simple. However, as it grew, it turned into an unmaintainable mess, and I got my first lesson in some basic coding standards.
My friend had a good distinction - there's "difficult" projects and "complicated" projects. Something that is difficult might require some clever algorithms and maybe more time spent with a pen and paper than at the keyboard/ Something that is complicated requires a lot of coding, and thus a lot of effort spent in organising that code.
That distinction between difficult and complicated is great, thanks for sharing that. My answer looks arrogant by comparison, because the distinction you shared allows both types of folks to be called programmers.
You're correct that lots of web development is simple. However, a very large assemblage of simple components is not simple, and lots of web apps are very large. For example: one of the first web projects I worked on was a game written in PHP and MySQL. At first, it went much faster than expected, as writing a basic CRUD app in PHP is very simple. However, as it grew, it turned into an unmaintainable mess, and I got my first lesson in some basic coding standards.
My friend had a good distinction - there's "difficult" projects and "complicated" projects. Something that is difficult might require some clever algorithms and maybe more time spent with a pen and paper than at the keyboard/ Something that is complicated requires a lot of coding, and thus a lot of effort spent in organising that code.