Is Computer Science Dead?

warm sushi writes "An academic at the British Computing Society asks, Is computer science dead? Citing falling student enrollments and improved technology, British academic Neil McBride claims that off-the-shelf solutions are removing much of the demand for high-level development skills: 'As commercial software products have matured, it no longer makes sense for organizations to develop software from scratch. Accounting packages, enterprise resource packages, customer relationship management systems are the order of the day: stable, well-proven and easily available.' Is that quote laughable? Or has the software development industry stabilized to an off-the-self commodity?"

Comments

Fortran dead ?

[aepervius]

Fortran is about as dead as scientific research on massive parallel calculation is. Most scientific I know only use Fortran package and certainly not C certainly not Java. Sure the compiler might use f2c or what not, but everything in Quantum Research as far as I know is done using fortran math lib and fortran programs.

A better question

[duffbeer703]

Is traditional Western society dead?

The west has already ceded manufacturing to Asia. Now we're in the process of exporting that high technology that was the fruit of hundreds of years of western dominance to Asia. Now we have clowns like this person saying that "everything that needs to be invented has been".

Sounds to me like decline. I guarantee you that Chinese firms aren't talking about shit like this -- they're busy educating hundreds of thousands of people in engineering and sciences while we whine about self-esteem.