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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?"
As well as off-the-shelf solutions, most SDKs, whether java, C# or even perl have such a rich API that in general the amount of "real" programming is relatively minimal. For example, I can't remember how long ago it was I had to write a linked-list (such as in C), as java makes it too easy to know almost nothing about how the computer represents data internally.
There are still "real" programmers around in commercial companies, they're writing device drivers, working with embedded micros, working alongside hardware designers doing custom chips in e.g. telecommunications and digital TV, and sometimes in compiler development.
Why was this guy modded a troll? He's absolutely right. When is the last time someone coded a data structure or algorithm they learned in a CS class? Stacks, linked lists, searching, sorting....its all in our favorite frameworks. The only guys actually coding this kind of stuff are the ones not using these types of frameworks - presumably people that do things like write device drivers.
And to be honest, I'm perfectly happy using someone else's implementation of a linked list, or of a sort. I still think its important to know how these things work; but there's no reason to go out and implement all of this stuff when some guy that specializes in the field already wrote it for me.
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nobody makes money on actual work anymore - what are the volumes on stock exchanges of the world and what these volumes have to do with the actual real wares and work - not much. This applies to iron smelters as well as bit smelters. The profits get virtualized while our jobs get globalized. Doing things is not really profitable anymore and brings our planet to its end anyway (as it causes different types of waste all over) so we should welcome this trend. The only problem is that this leads us from (kind of) democratic society with citizens having some and same rights to the society where few plutocrats own almost all and control all. But besides that it is a trend to be welcomed.
Side question: why are these applications written by none experts so crapy. COuld this be that they miss skills or brains or possible both?
The real distinction is between CS and IS. If anything goes the way of the mammoths, it would be IS - and all for the better.