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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.'"
When I started working at the huge multinational company I work at now, there were three things that I had very little experience with that everyone swore would last at the company for decades to come: Token Ring, Netware, and Lotus Notes. I insisted that within the next few years, these technologies would be dead and the company would have to change, and I was constantly reminded of the millions of dollars invested in them.
It's eight years later. We have no Token Ring network. We have no Netware servers. I'm doing my damned best to convince people of how bad Lotus Notes sucks, and most everyone agrees, but we have a Notes support team that really likes their jobs and somehow manages to convince upper level management that it would cost billions of dollars to change to a real e-mail and collaboration solution. But I'm still holding out hope.
Godwilling, Lotus Notes will soon be on this list as well.
Non-IP networks are dying? Must tell that to makers of Infiniband cards, who are carving out a very nice LAN niche and are set on moving into the WAN market. Also need to tell that to xDSL providers, who invariably use ATM, not IP. And if you consider IP to mean IPv4, then the US Government should be informed forthwith that its migration to IPv6 is "dead". Oh, and for satellite communication, they've only just got IP to even work. Since they weren't using string and tin cans before, I can only assume most in use are controlled via non-IP protocols and that this will be true for a very long time. More down-to-earth, PCI's latest specs allows for multiple hosts and is becoming a LAN protocol. USB, FireWire and Bluetooth are all networks of a sort - Bluetooth has a range of a mile, if you connect the devices via rifle.
C programming. Well, yes, the web is making pure C less useful for some applications, but I somehow don't think pure C developers will be begging in the streets any time soon. Device driver writers are in heavy demand, and you don't get far with those if you're working in Java. There are also an awful lot of patches/additions to Linux (a pure C environment), given this alleged death of C. I'd love to see someone code a hard realtime application (again, something in heavy demand) in AJAX. What about those relational databases mentioned earlier in the story? Those written in DHTML? Or do I C an indication of other languages at work?
Netware - well, given the talk about non-IP dying, this is redundant and just a filler. It's probably right, but it has no business being there with the other claim. One should go.
What should be there? Well, Formal Methods is dying, replaced by Extreme Programming. BSD is dying, but only according to Netcraft. Web programming is dying - people no longer write stuff, they use pre-built components. Pure parallel programming is dying -- it's far more efficient to have the OS divide up the work and rely on multi-CPU, multi-core, hyperthreaded systems to take care of all the tracking than it is to mess with very advanced programming techniques, message-passing libraries and the inevitable deadlock issues. Asynchronous hardware is essentially dead. Object-Oriented Databases seem to be pretty much dead. 3D outside of games seems to be dead. Memory-efficient and CPU-efficient programming methods are certainly dead. I guess that would be my list.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I've said it before, and I'll say it again... lists like this are ridiculously stupid and not thought out. Its like "hey this is old it must be obsolete."
The first two items on the list made me not want to take the author seriously. The financial business is run on COBOL and flat files, and will continue for some time. The language is not pretty, but it was made for a specific purpose and it does it well. In fact, demand for COBOL programmers has risen dramatically as people retire, and it is 7 years after Y2K. I know people who were asked to come out of retirement to work on COBOL again, for very high salaries, because it is not taught to us youngens anymore.
I got nothin'
Wow. I didn't actually expect this to be on the list but I am not at all surprised. We use it at my work as the primary web platform and I can assure you of two things regarding the language: 1) it is very hard to find someone with development skills using it and 2) the ones who do have the skills are VERY expensive. That seems to go along nicely with the theme of the article that it is in fact a dying skill. While I personally have never developed much of a taste for it (I do post on /. after all - it would be like heresy / blasphemy) there are a few long-time-developers here that have an unholy allegiance to it, almost completely unwilling to even look at alternate environments or frameworks. I would guess that is probably similar for many of the languages/skills on this list and their long time supporters.
I beg to differ. Whilst I agree that there's some shocking solutions out there, I develop applications using the http://mach-ii.com/ framework and it makes for a great development platform; since version 6 (MX) it has supported components that allows for using object oriented development principles.
.net or Java. Unfortunately & ironically, the low availability of developers pushes the case for enterprises to phase the solutions out, as it is too hard to get people who are good at it - even though it is a perfect fit for a lot of the work.
If one was to use crappy solutions as an argument, how come anyone is still using php, asp, etc? I think ColdFusion has copped it more than any due to its low threshold of entry, but just because one _can_ make a shit solution using a platform doesn't mean the platform is shit.
Have been using ColdFusion for 11 years now and it keeps getting better. It's a great second language to know in addition to
ISO certified == THX certified
We've already gotten 35 years out of C, and it is still going strong. Not as much used at it used to be, but not insignificant.
In addition to that, you could say that the C we have today is an old 'stable' fork of that language, which is now moving ahead in the form of C++.
- These characters were randomly selected.
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Well, not necessarily so. It does help to see the "wiring under the board", granted, and to see the difference between static and dynamic allocation, especially in subroutines (given the amount of buffer overflow exploits, I guess quite a few people at MS still don't know it), but to understand pointers, or why they can come very handy, you should rather learn some theory about trees, lists and so on. It will not "show" you where your memory is allocated, but it will certainly give you an idea just why and how pointers are very useful.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I remember being able to squeeze 704K of conventional memory out of some systems (shadow RAM at $A0000, and a video card that sat at $B0000), then have certain programs complain that there was insufficient memory... because their counters wrapped at 640. Good times indeed.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
That's right, after Microsoft shipped Windows 95, they dumped hundreds of millions on pushing Windows NT at the server markets. It was a full blown marketing attack on UNIX, Netware, and Lan Manager/OS/2 and we know it is marketing which won the day and admins who lost. How many UNIX servers turned into a dozen WinTel PCs after they found out one WinTel PC couldn't a few server processes and had to be split into one service/PC. Then they had to pull in replication to get anything close to the 99.9999% uptime of the UNIX systems.
:-/
Yup, it's interesting how snake oil still gets sold year after year but only under a different name. IMO.
Oh, and virtualization, that's all about moving all those single tasking servers back into one box where one crash won't take out the others. That's innovation for ya. Go Microsoft!
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Phone systems are meant to just work and often the idea is that if it's still working it should be left that way. I contract for an ISP that has it's own adsl equipment and have an access card that gets me into several Bell Canada Buildings in Montreal and one in Toronto.
The telephone world is a weird mix of the state of the art and old.
I regularly see software that comes on 9 track reels and other ancient equipment.. My biggest shock was seeing in downtown Toronto equipment that still uses vacuum tubes.
Turbo Pascal, phased out with Delphi and Free Pascal/Lazarus replacing it. I still know people who know Turbo Pascal and I learned Turbo Pascal in 1985.
// series is long since dead and buried, but still alive in some poor school districts that couldn't afford to replace them.
// or CP/M systems and the Atari, Commodore, Sinclair/Timex, etc were used in the home mostly.
LANTastic, I recall some people were experts with this network. I can recall when Windows for Workgroups came out and had built in networking that LANTastic went on decline.
DBase and Clipper, I can recall porting databases and code written in them to MS-Access in 1996-1997.
Wordperfect 5.0/6.0 macro writing. I know some small law firms that still have document templates automated with Wordperfect 5.0 for DOS or Windows. Hardly anyone else uses Wordperfect and has moved to MS-Word and used VBA for Macros.
AmigaDOS/AmigaOS it used to be the bee's knees for video and multi-media in the late 1980's, I am one of the few left that still has Amiga skills on my resume. AmigaOS reached 4.0 quite some time ago, but hardly anyone uses it anymore except in Europe for various niche markets.
ProDOS, AppleDOS, I think the Apple
Mac OS9 and earlier, I think Mac OSX is the top dog now. The Classic MacOS is no longer in demand, and 68K Macs are only used in school districts that couldn't afford to replace them.
BeOS, despite trying to bring it back from the dead it using open source, BeOS used to be popular in the late 1990's and used to run on PowerPC Macs and Intel PCs. I can recall some of my friends used to develop software for BeOS, but not anymore.
Wang, some people I know still list Wang skills on their resume. It used to be in high demand, but once Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 Server came out, there was a mass migration from Wang, after Wang got shrunk and almost went out of business. They did have some Visual BASIC graphic tool called Wang ImageBasic, but I think Internet Explorer 4.0 or 5.0 broke it and so did Visual BASIC 6.0 break it. I think Leadtools replaced it.
8 Bit Computers, nobody really uses them anymore. Big Businesses only used the Apple
The Apple Newton, the Palm Pilot and Windows CE devices replaced it.
Arcnet and Starnet cards, Ethernet replaced them. Token Ring is almost dead, but some die-hard IBM Fans still use it at their companies. Anyone remember making twisted pair and coaxial cable network wires for Arcnet and Starnet networks? I do.
MS-DOS 6.X and Windows 3.X and earlier, like OS/2 they deserve to be mentioned. I think some older charities non-profit organizations still use them on old 286/386 systems that cannot run even Windows 95, and they use a Netware 3.X server to share files with them.
MS-Foxpro, does anyone still use it? After MS-Access got upgraded, and MS-SQL Server had more features added to it, MS-Foxpro became redundant.
Assembly Language, Machine Language, remember writing native code for the 8088, 68000, 6502, 6809, IBM Mainframes, etc? Hardly any company wants us to write in Assembly or Machine language anymore. It seems like only hackers use these to do exploits and write malware.
FORTRAN, I think BASIC and C sort of replaced it, and then C++ and Java replaced them. FORTRAN got NASA to the moon, but NASA uses Java or Python now.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I think they're confused, anyway -- they're writers, not programmers. I bet I can even guess how they did their research: they called up all the recruiters they could find and asked each one to list the languages he/she thought were dead or dying. Then they compared notes on all the responses they got, and built their final list.
. 09/CallingCCodefromJava/index.htmlr amming/JDCBook/jniexamp.html
I think the list should be called "top 10 languages recruiters don't want to hear about" because that would be more accurate.
Realistically, as far as C goes I think the following factors should be considered before declaring it a dead language:
1. Most of the more popular object oriented languages (Java, C#, C++) use C syntax. C++ is a superset of C.
2. Java can use compiled C modules as an analog to C's old "escape to assembler" technique. In other words, you can call C code from Java when you have something you want to get "close to the metal" on. Thus, a "Java Programmer" may very well ALSO be a C programmer, even if technically that isn't on his resume or job description. I can do this; I imagine most other Java programmers can as well. What's funny is that, once you're calling C code, you can turn around and use the C code to call assembler, Fortran, or whatever else you like! What a weird world this is!
(Links for the skeptical):
http://www.csharp.com/javacfort.html (Ironic that it's on a CSharp site, no?)
http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.13/13
http://java.sun.com/developer/onlineTraining/Prog
3. Linux is still written in C, I believe. As are its drivers, KDE-related programs, Gnome-related programs, and whatnot.
4. C is the modern version of assembler, isn't it?
ANYway, I don't think C's going anywhere. You might not be able to get PAID for doing it, as your main speciality will probably be something more buzzword-heavy, but you'll probably be doing some of it as a part of whatever other weird and mysterious things you do in the ITU.
Poor journalists... One suspects they're rather easily confused these days.
NO CARRIER
I went to dice.com and started a blank search.
The number of jobs(posted in the last 30 days) that was listed if I picked C as a skill?
Answer: 17139 jobs
Java?
Answer: 15760 jobs
So.....Myth-busted?
Money is the root of all evil?
Wow, to the poster above, thank you, that's a fantastic analogy!
I've been beaten over the head with the "it does a LOT of things!" stick so many times it makes me sick. The problem is that it really sucks at all of them!
It's really comical. Here's a typical me/Notes goober conversation:
As a technical professional with a strong background in systems architecture and server administration, I would highly advice any serious businessperson to avoid Lotus Notes like the plague. Ignore me at you and your career's peril.