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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'
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
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
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.