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.'"

Comments

I disagree with some of the list.

[jd]

Cobol has died back as much as it's going to, same as Fortran. It won't reduce in scale any further, because of maintenance requirements, so it is meaningless to say it is "dying". It's a stagnant segment, but it's a perfectly stable segment.

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.

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