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Top 10 Dead (or Dying) Computer Skills
Lucas123 writes "Computerworld reporter Mary Brandel spoke with academics and head hunters to compile this list of computer skills that are dying but may not yet have taken their last gasp. The article's message: Obsolescence is a relative — not absolute — term in the world of technology. 'In the early 1990s, it was all the rage to become a Certified NetWare Engineer, especially with Novell Inc. enjoying 90% market share for PC-based servers. "It seems like it happened overnight. Everyone had Novell, and within a two-year period, they'd all switched to NT," says David Hayes, president of HireMinds LLC in Cambridge, Mass.'"
with MS equation editor becoming passable, journals that will mark your work up for you and quasi-wysiwyg TeX editors, people who 'do' LaTeX are hard to come by. (Afaik, I was the only person out of ~60 in my year (of physicists) who typed their project report up in LaTeX as plain LaTeX markup. About 4 other people used an editor. Everyone else used word.) Or maybe it's just that the students in my department are lazy and take little pride in the presentation of their work.
FGD 135
No better place to dovetail than first post.
/. index in search of better things to quibble over.
Here's a link to the print version for those who dislike clicking 18 times to read a news piece.
And for those not wanting to feed the gossiping trolls altogether, here's the (pointless) "Top 10" list in short form.
1. Cobol
2. Nonrelational DBMS
3. Non-IP networks
4. cc:Mail
5. ColdFusion
6. C programming
7. PowerBuilder
8. Certified NetWare Engineers
9. PC network administrators
10. OS/2
You may now return to the
I don't see where either of these are going away.
There just aren't that many people that know networking outside of IT and there are still a lot of people that get confused about what is going on. I have seen where many people have cluged together a network at their office, but then they find out it sucks after awhile, so they have to call somebody in to look at it.
C programming is going away. I'm always seeing algorithms with some part of C in them. Partly because these guys with VB skills say hey there is no reason to learn all that hard stuff. We'll just get more/bigger hardware. So far they have spent $300K on hardware and 5 man years of programming. They've got a lot of code but nothing to show for it. Runs fast and cranks through a lot of data, but nobody can figure out what it's good for.
He who said 1,000,000 monkeys on 1,000,000 typewriters would eventually type the great novel, never saw an AOL chat room
C's use at PC application level programming is over.
C as a vehicle for embedded programming is very much alive. I work as an embedded programming for devices ranging from 8 bit PIC's to DSP's and most things in between.
How would you like to code a TCP/IP stack in asm? It's not entertaining and while low power low cost embedded devices are more and more having ethernet MAC and PHY layers embedded in them C programming for these devices becomes more and more important. At the point where a $1.50 micro can give you 10+ mips, asm programming is more in danger of dieing than C.
If you have an embedded monitoring app i challenge you to find a more cost effective solution than using a PIC from the pic18f97j60 family, and you had between be comfortable with ANSI spec C to do anything really useful with it. At $5 a chip there is no easier way to add TCP/IP support to a low bandwidth application (the chip can sustain something around 5-6 MBit a sec while running useful code)
I think the REAL point that this article should make is that if you are only capable of programming in one language or API...your days are numbers no matter what, to exist in the engineering world of today you need to understand COMPUTING at a hardware level. At this point the language or API you use is trivial.
If you can't pick up a language or API after a week working with it you are simply in the wrong field.
-xian
I'm nostalgic too. Delphi still is one of the best development systems for Windows out there. Too bad Borland/Inprise/Borland jumped on the .NET bandwagon and destroyed it. But if you get an old copy of D6 (or D7? cannot remember which one was the last non .NET-polluted version) you can write great software with it.
Also, take a look at Lazarus. It's a multiplatform and open source Delphi clone that brought the beauty of Delphi to Linux.
Note that it's 100% native on all platforms and produces 100% native code: no Wine, no emulations. Young but already powerful, and damn funny to use!
Well, yeah, every language will eventually fade out. But C is still going on strong, as its still the language of choice for many low level applications. I just searched Monster.com and found over 2500 jobs referencing C (its possible that some of the results are because the term "C" is too generic, but most of the titles indicate that C programming is actually part of the job), while Python gets 419, Ruby gets 168, PHP gets 612, and JavaScript gets 1736. How the hell can C be considered dead if its one of the most popular languages around, and probably still the best available choice for a huge class of applications (just not web applications)?
And in fact even the "dead and buried" Cobol is still alive, with 174 jobs. Now, its not as much as the more popular languages, but its still more than Ruby, which is supposed to be the next big thing.
Anyways, from TFA:
Despite what this guy thinks, web programming hasn't "taken over", and never will. Yes, it has a large niche, but there are many systems out there that are not, nor never will be web applications. Unfortunately some people (like this guy, he owns some dumb .com company that no one has ever heard of, how does that make him an expert on the subject) have tunnel vision and think that since they work on web applications, everyone else must as well.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
You sounds trollish, but I'll bite anyway.
I've coded some fairly complicated high performance multi-threaded applications in C. It's not easy, but it's not easy in C# or Java either. There have been many minor improvements to the required syntax, but that has never been the hard part of multi-threaded development. Parallelizing (sp, I know) the problem is a conceptual problem unrelated to language.
Mine did. If I had chosen to, I could have made it through the entire curriculum primarily using Java.
My Operating Systems course had an assignment writing multi-threaded applications using semaphores and a simulated scheduler. You could write it in C or in Java. The option was there because about half the students never took C as part of their 100-level and 200-level core (you could take either Java or C). Compiler design was covered in one class, but it was entirely theoretical book work with no implementation IIRC (been a few years).
Some courses required using C or C++, but if you wanted to you could avoid them. Sure you get "exposure" to C/C++ in 200-level Intro to Programming Languages, but it was cursory at best unless you were self-directed. Even 3D graphics allowed the java openGL wrapper. Yuck.
My point is, you could have made it through with maybe one semester worth of very basic C. But like any educational experience, what you get out of it is what you put into it. I know I got a lot more out of it then many of my peers who took CS because "computer stuff pays well." I'm not so sure it's paying them well now, unless they took jobs managing geeks like me instead of being a geek themselves.
Hey, wait a minute....
If Star Trek had the internet: Captain, we've received an IM from the romulans. "Surrender or be destroyed. LOL. o.O"
Simple economics: developer time is expensive, and the cost of it keeps rising with inflation, if not beating it, making the cost of developer time ever more expensive in real terms.
Meanwhile, hardware continues to drop in price in both nominal (not inflation-adjusted) and real (inflation-adjusted) terms.
It's cheaper to implement for a 16 core, 8GByte RAM box than it is to pay a developer to optimize the code so it can run on a single 486DX2/66...
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
No it's not cheaper to implement for a 16 core space heater. The majority of computers sold today are not the mini tower room heater that you may have beside you, but embedded devices. ARM cores outsell x86 by a large margin. Atmel and Microchip sell billions of 8 bit devices every year. Zilog still manufactures the Z80, as well as microcontroller style Z80 chips. For every space heater PC, there are ten other devices that use a small processor (washing machines, microwaves, phones, cars, televisions etc.)
You _have_ to write efficient code for those. The laws of physics say that these small processors will *not* get substantially faster, because they need to be very low power and have very small die sizes, so you can't just throw MHz and extra transistors at them to compensate for software bloat. Anybody working with embedded computers still has to write efficient code, and get as close to the metal as they can. This means assembly language or C.
The cost of developer time in an embedded device that will ship millions of units is trivial compared to having to use a more powerful microcontroller to compensate for bloated code. In the PC world, of course, the opposite holds true - since the software developer is only shipping a software device, they can just rely on the customer to buy beefier hardware at no cost to the software developer. Embedded developers cannot push the cost of bloat onto their customers without losing out to their competitors.
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Less than that, even. I bet there's a lot of Unix user-land software out there which assumes that "number of seconds since the epoch" is a 32-bit unsigned int, which IIRC runs out in 2038.