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

c ? really?

[stoolpigeon]

doesn't really match up with my experience. and putting it next to powerbuilder? that's just not right.

Re:c ? really?

[WrongSizeGlass]

'C' will never die. Period. It has so many uses from PC's & 'big iron' to embedded systems.

Re:c ? really?

[fyngyrz]

No, C isn't in any way going out. C produces fast, tight code that so far, C++ and C# can't even begin to match. C++ is just C with a lot of baggage, a great deal of which you can implement in C in a completely controllable, transparent and maintainable manner. We use the most important of those regularly in C code, specifically objects and objects with methods. We obtain better performance, smaller executables, and smaller memory footprints than any company that makes similar software using C++ or Objective C's add-on paradigms. C, and the C sub-domain of C++ and so on, is no more "going away" than C++ itself is. C occupies a unique niche between the metal of assembly and the (so far) considerably less efficient higher level languages — I'm talking about results here, not code. I'm all about recognizing that a few lines of C++ are very convenient, but the cost of those lines is still too high to even think about abandoning C code for performance applications. For many, the object isn't finding the absolute easiest way to write code, but instead trying to find a balance between portability, reasonable code effort and high performance. C sits exactly in that niche. C++ is easier to write, almost as portable, but produces applications with large footprints, inherited, unfixable problems inside non-transparent objects (like Microsoft's treeview, to name one), and a considerable loss of speed as compared to a coder who has a good sense of just what the C compiler actually does (which usually means a C coder that has assembly experience, intimate knowledge of stacks and registers and heaps and so on.)

Speaking as the guy who does the hiring around here, If your resume shows C and assembler experience, you've made a great start. Even just assembler. C or C++ only, and your odds have dropped considerably. C, assembler and either a great math background or specifically signal processing, and now we're talking. C++ doesn't hurt your chances, but you won't get to use it around here. :)

Re:c ? really?

[tha_mink]

'C' will never die. Period. It has so many uses from PC's & 'big iron' to embedded systems. What is 'C'? Is that a language? Like latin?

I'm kidding, but only partially. I was a COBOL developer for lots of years, and I thought that COBOL would never die either. I would say "Too many companies are too invested ..." blah blah blah. I think that I actually even used the 'big iron' quote too when telling my friend how secure COBOL was. Um...I was wrong. I found that out with plenty of time to learn other stuff like Java and so forth but of course it's going to die. Just like C++ will die, just like Java will die, et al. If you've been in our business long enough, you should know better. Everything dies, it's just a matter of time. And if you think you're going to get 30 years out of the technologies that are new now, then you're wrong there too. That's the double edge sword that is the IT business. Keep learning, keep growing or start flipping burgers.

Re:c ? really?

[Chainsaw]

C produces fast, tight code that so far, C++ and C# can't even begin to match. C++ is just C with a lot of baggage, a great deal of which you can implement in C in a completely controllable, transparent and maintainable manner.

Wow. You must have had some really shitty software engineers. It's very likely that you can create C++ code that is as fast or faster than C. Yes, I said it. Implementing virtual inheritance and method overloading in plain C is doable, but it will be very complex. Templates? Don't even want to think about it.

C++ is easier to write, almost as portable, but produces applications with large footprints, inherited, unfixable problems inside non-transparent objects (like Microsoft's treeview, to name one), and a considerable loss of speed as compared to a coder who has a good sense of just what the C compiler actually does (which usually means a C coder that has assembly experience, intimate knowledge of stacks and registers and heaps and so on.)

I have no idea what the MS Treeview problem is, but once again - the programmers that you have worked with must have sucked balls. I'm an old C coder, with some solid x86 assembler knowledge. As you say, it's possible to get very high performing applications using C. However, why would I do that, when I can create code that is just as fast and much more readable by using C++? Yes - even for embedded development, which is my dayjob.

Re:c ? really?

[Penguinshit]

Or do what I did and move into management...

Re:c ? really?

[WrongSizeGlass]

And if you think you're going to get 30 years out of the technologies that are new now, then you're wrong there too. I've been coding in 'C' for 24 years, and unless OS's, drivers, embedded systems, et al, stop caring about performance I think 'C' will out last me in this industry (and probably out live me, too).

That's the double edge sword that is the IT business. Keep learning, keep growing or start flipping burgers. I've coded in over 20 languages in my career, from assembly languages to proprietary 4GL's and everything in between, on more platforms than I have fingers. My library has programming texts older than most coders today. Keep learning? Great advice. Give up on 'C'? That's another story entirely ...

Re:c ? really?

[grumbel]

### C produces fast, tight code that so far,

So can other languages, I don't think that is the main selling point of C. I think the main selling point of C is that it is by far the most "compatible" language of all. Python, Perl, Ruby and friends are all based on C, if you want to extend the languages, you do so by writing a module using their C API. If you want to simply call C functions, you can do so from many other languages as well be it Lisp, Ada or whatever. If you want to talk to the kernel you do so in C. No matter what language you use, sooner or later you come to a point where you have to fall back and either write C or interface with C code, since C is the 'real thing', while everything else is just an ugly wrapper around C code, trying to hide it, but often failing at doing so properly.

As long as a ton of stuff is based on C code it isn't going away, especially not in the OpenSource world where basically everything is based on C.

Maybe one day some Java or .net based OS will take over, but I don't see that happening for many years or decade(s?) to come.

Re:c ? really?

[Plutonite]

You are definitely right, and it's not just because what happend over the last 24 years of your engineering history is likely to carry over..it's also the nature of the language itself. There is a reason C (and C++) are so damn popular, and the reason is that they embody most, if not all, of what can be done with a general purpose language. Things like Java and Python will stay for quite a while too, because the design there is more conforming to object-orientation while keeping most of the general-pupose flexibility, but C and the various assembly languages will never die. It would require a re-write of the entire architectural basis of computing to throw them out, and the theoretical part of computation theory does not need features that are unavailable here (yet). Anything that can be done in any language can be done (albeit less elegantly) with the aforesaid.

No one shall expel us from the Paradise that Richie has created (Apologies to David Hilbert)

Re:c ? really?

[Javagator]

I thought that COBOL would never die

Wait until Y3K. Then everyone will come crawling back, offering COBOL programmers big bucks.

Re:c ? really?

[nwbvt]

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:

As the Web takes over, C languages are also becoming less relevant, according to Padveen. "C++ and C Sharp are still alive and kicking, but try to find a basic C-only programmer today, and you'll likely find a guy that's unemployed and/or training for a new skill," he says.

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.

Re:c ? really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Several times I've been told "nobody does assembler anymore", and yet I still keep needing to use it. I'm not writing whole applications in assembler of course. But the same reasons I keep having to do assembler are some of the same reasons that C is used. C and assembler may be less commonly used than in the past, but unlike COBOL, modern computer systems are still very heavily dependent upon them. Until we get a radically new form of computer architecture, which doesn't seem likely anytime soon, demand will remain for people who can write and maintain the guts of what happens underneath the applications. And you can't do that in Java or C# or Ruby.

Computerworld Magazine, being an IT rag, is concerned about IT, not computer science or engineering. Thus it worries about product names, not categories. So the point out skills in SNA or Novell Netware that aren't needed so much anymore, even though computer networking skills are even more popular and vital today than in the past. COBOL may be virtually dead, but dry and dusty applications for business purposes are alive and well and written by people who still wear ties.

Re:c ? really?

[gfody]

hi Peter

Re:c ? really?

[644bd346996]

Sure, some things still need to be done in assembly, but they are always wrapped in a C api. And that is why C will not die until computer architectures change drastically. C is close enough to the hardware that you really know what is going on, and you can control it directly. Languages like Java, which eschew pointers and mandate that all code be in a class, can never replace C.

In fact, no language that isn't pretty much C can replace C. If it doesn't give you the control over pointers and memory allocation that you have with C, it won't work as a replacement. If it does have those thing, it is not going to replace C unless it is a backwards compatible extension like C++ or Obj-C.

Re:c ? really?

[fishbowl]

>I'm surprised that Fortran didn't make the list.

I would have been, but working in scientific research I've discovered a couple of things that are surprising:

1. People actually do calculus on the whiteboard for reasons other than taking a math class.

2. Lots of people actually use FORTRAN. Even people whose Java, C, C++, Perl, Ruby, etc. skills are such that I look up to them -- and they have solid arguments for using FORTRAN, at least for certain kinds of numerical computing.

But here's the thing: There are separate worlds. In one world, the idea of using calculus on a daily basis is simply never a consideration. You learn enough to finish college, and that's the end of it. Likewise, there's a world where numerical computing and arbitrary precision and optimized complex arithmetic are actually primary considerations and not just hypothetical things.

I never understood this until I found myself in that world. And I wouldn't have believed you if you told me that people who know other languages, choose FORTRAN even when given a choice.

But what I take from it, is that there are requirements that are met by FORTRAN which are not met by languages that offer more comfortable grammars.

People (myself included) will argue that, for instance, C can do anything that FORTRAN can do, in a much happier grammar (opinion, mine, widely shared), but the thing is... while that's strictly true, a lot of the things that seem tangential or irrelevant, turn out to be *crucial*, where seriously optimized math support is the core of the application. FORTRAN makes guarantees on the kinds of things that are implementation dependent in C.

Anyway, there's no shortage of FORTRAN programmers. It's quite easy for a skilled programmer to learn FORTRAN, once you get past the 'WTF' factor and can accept that it's relevant in todays world, at least when your problem space is a good fit for the language.

COBOL or PL/1 and the like, make another story entirely. My experience has been that the role of COBOL has been replaced by the combination of transitions to modern RDBMS, decentralized business processes as a side-effect of the whole ubiquitous "PC" adoption, and the adoption of, for example, Enterprise Java. That covers one end of the spectrum, and the other end (the big corporate end) is covered by the evolution of vertical systems providers (e.g., Peoplesoft, SAP, SAIC).

Back on topic: If there's a university CS program that gives degrees without courses in Operating System and Compiler design taught in C, I'd love to hear about it. No way are C programmers in decreasing supply. If nothing else, the million or so open source projects have created a whole generation of self-taught folks who know C.

Re:c ? really?

[SadGeekHermit]

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.

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. 09/CallingCCodefromJava/index.html
http://java.sun.com/developer/onlineTraining/Progr amming/JDCBook/jniexamp.html

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.

Re:c ? really?

[atomicstrawberry]

When you say 'based on C', do you mean that the compiler / interpreter is written in C, or that the language itself is derived from C? Because technically Ruby is based off Perl and Smalltalk, not C. The Perl side of things can be traced back to C, but Smalltalk's origins are in Lisp.

However they are all implemented in C, as is PHP. In fact, I'm reasonably confident you'll find all of the web languages that the article declares are taking over are implemented using C. As is Apache, which is the backbone of the majority of internet servers. In fact, pretty much everything that provides important infrastructure is written in C.

There may be demand right now for programmers that know the latest fad high-level language, but the demand for competent C programmers has hardly disappeared. The only reason that C would die is if another fast, portable, general-purpose language like it came along that offered significant benefits over C. I can't personally see that happening any time soon.

Re:c ? really?

[Khashishi]

Any programmer worth his salt can pick up a new language in a couple hours. Hell, most languages today are just ALGOL with some syntactical refinements, and you know one, you know them all. I'm not worried if Java or C or Matlab dies out. What separates programmers is ability, not language experience.

Re:c ? really?

[Kjella]

Any programmer worth his salt can pick up a new language in a couple hours.

If you mean whether it's curly braces or brackets or none at all and the syntax of basic control flow, then yes. If you mean being familiar with the standard library, the development tools and all the specific bits (Java generics, C++ templates, take your pick)? No.

Re:c ? really?

[shutdown -p now]

Any programmer worth his salt can pick up a new language in a couple hours. Hell, most languages today are just ALGOL with some syntactical refinements, and you know one, you know them all.

Surely you meant to write, "all ALGOL-family languages"? Which includes most mainstream ones: C/C++, Java, C#, Python, Perl, BASIC etc. But you can't easily jump from C++ to Lisp, Erlang, Prolog or FORTH (just to name a few) easily, because they are different. Then there are people having troubles moving from class-based OOP (Java) to prototype-based (JavaScript). Etc... there is a lot out there, and it does differ.

Re:c ? really?

[jimicus]

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.

Re:Number 1

[stinerman]

And the ability to use spell checkers...

Some of the list looks good

[Sycraft-fu]

But C? Really? I guess that the fact that nearly every game, every OS, almost every high performance computation tool and so on are written in it (or C++ which I keep under the same heading) doesn't count. While it certainly isn't the be-all, end-all, it is still widely used. Even games that make extensive use of scripting languages, such as Civilization 4, are still C/C++ for the core functions.

Until there's enough spare processor cycles that it really doesn't matter how much CPU time you use, or a managed language gets as good at optimizing as a good C compiler/programmer combo (unlikely) I don't think C is going anywhere.

Re:Some of the list looks good

[LWATCDR]

C++ is still alive and well.
I think they are wrong since C is still used on a lot of embedded systems where C++ is too heavy.
BTW a good number of HPC tools and applications are still written in FORTRAN.

ColdFusion Dead?

[AKAImBatman]

I can only hope. Terrible, terrible language. Of course, these days it's actually a template engine for a J2EE server. So it's not nearly as bad as it once was. Unfortunately, most of the ColdFusion projects are massive, sprawling directories from the CF4/CF5 days. You're not likely to see a nicely package JAR here. :-/

Also, what's with "PC Network Administrators"? TFA must be referring to a rather specialized form of administrator, because last I checked we still needed someone to keep the desktops configured, the networks running, the file severs sharing, the login servers logging people in, and the IIS servers serving.

Wait, there IT people who specialize this much?

[Rakishi]

I mean, this is IT where things change quickly and at times unexpectedly. If you don't have at least a number of diverse skills then I can't say I feel sorry for you when your job gets axed. I may not be a guru in any one language but at least I won't be unemployed when that language dies out.

C? You must be kidding

[Ckwop]

As the Web takes over, C languages are also becoming less relevant, according to Padveen. "C++ and C Sharp are still alive and kicking, but try to find a basic C-only programmer today, and you'll likely find a guy that's unemployed and/or training for a new skill," he says.

What the web can now allocate memory and talk to my hardware? Even if you're not a kernel programmer, the web has sucked and still sucks for application development. It will continue to suck for years, due to Internet Explorer. It's misleading to claim AJAX will solve all these problems because it won't. In fact, it might even cause a few problems of its own. For example, do you really think all that AJAX is secure? In short, I think the web is taking over what naturally comes to that medium. It is wrong to say its displaced C.

Does this guy forget that all of the GNU/Linux Kernel base system is written in C? You know, the operating system that powers most web-servers? I'll tell you one thing, C will still be here in twenty years time when Ruby on Rails is talked about much in the same was Blitz Basic is today. C is here to stay; it's immortal.

Simon

LaTeX

[Anonymous Cowpat]

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.

Re:LaTeX

[serviscope_minor]

You're the lazy one. You know, avoiding all that tracking of cross references, mindless reformatting, applying styles, and doing battle with the (still) inadequate equation editor. Slacker.

True story...

[KingSkippus]

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.

If only...

[26199]

...writing unreliable, poorly-documented, just-about-does-the-job-and-only-if-you-get-lucky code would go out of fashion.

Sadly it seems to be here to stay. In fact with the better availability/quality of scripting languages it is, if anything, becoming more popular...

10 more dying computer skills

[Anonymous Coward]

1. secure software coding
  2. data management theory
  3. data modeling
  4. usability
  5. interface design
  6. use of testing, version control, refactoring, and other best practices
  7. space or time efficient algorithms
  8. general communications skills
  9. basic business concepts like ROI
10. business ethics

dovetail

[Anonymous Coward]

No better place to dovetail than first post.

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 /. index in search of better things to quibble over.

Re:dovetail

[MightyMartian]

I don't think you can justify C and Cobol. There are millions upon millions of lines of code in these two languages, and despite all the sexy new ones that have come along, these two still reign supreme; C is incredibly prevalent on dedicated systems and within a lot of operating systems, and mainframe Cobol code can still be found throughout the business world (though often cleverly disguised these days). I doubt a skilled Cobol programmer will be at risk of starving any time in the near future.

Re:dovetail

[StarvingSE]

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.

Re:dovetail

[Stormwatch]

10 PRINT "What, no BASIC?"
20 GOTO 10

Re:dovetail

[Watts Martin]

I think you (and many others) are somewhat missing the point of the article, although the somewhat histrionic headline encourages a "miss the forest for the trees" reading.

I don't think anyone is expecting C or even COBOL to vanish with the speed of PowerBuilder or NetWare; the issue is whether those are actually "growth markets" any more. The article is asserting they're not, and particularly in COBOL's case I'm pretty sure that's correct. COBOL will probably live on for quite some time, but you don't hear much about people deploying new COBOL projects -- you hear about them supporting existing ones that haven't been replaced.

As for "but the OSes are written in C!" as a battle cry: well, yes, they are. But 25 years ago, they sure weren't: C was just too damn big and slow to write an operating system in. What's happened since then? Computers have gotten orders of magnitude faster, RAM and disk space have gotten orders of magnitude bigger, and of course compiler technology has also just gotten better. Couple that with the fact that operating systems and the computers they run on are just a lot more complicated -- having a higher-level language to deal with that, even at the system level, is a real advantage. There's nothing that prevents you from writing an operating system in assembly language now, but under most circumstances you probably wouldn't want to.

The thing is, unless you want to assert that computers twenty years from now will not be much faster and have much more storage and be much more complicated, you can't assert that moving to a higher-level language than C will never be either practical or beneficial even at a system level. I don't expect C to go away or even be relegated to "has-been" status, but I suspect in the long term it isn't a growth skill. It's going to move more deeply into embedded systems and other arenas where small is not merely beautiful but necessary.

The comparison with COBOL may be overstated, but it may not be completely inapt: the fact that there are still COBOL jobs out there and they may actually be fairly high-paying ones doesn't mean that going to school, in 2007, in preparation for a career as a COBOL developer is a bright idea. The same isn't as true for C, but I'm not convinced that's going to stay true for that much longer, let alone indefinitely.

Web Design

[happyfrogcow]

Judging by their web page, all design jobs are dead too. We should all just write web pages to serve ads, because C is dead.

This article is trash, even if it does have some technologies that are irrelevant. It has very little value to the reader. I'd rather read a 10 top list for reasons Paris Hilton should be locked up for life.

C and PC network administrators?

[baggins2001]

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.

Re:They are nuts on the C front.

[Dionysus]

a C programmer can move to C++ without a problem but the reverse is not true I find the opposite to be true. A C++ programmer is able to move to C without much problems, but the oppose it just not true.

It's not C. It's the C only programmer.

[khasim]

They phrased it very badly. C isn't going anywhere. But if all you know is C, then you are very rare.

Most programmers who know C also know at least one other language.

In any event, putting that on the list was just stupid.

PC network admins?

[Volante3192]

With the accelerating move to consolidate Windows servers, some see substantially less demand for PC network administrators.

Apparently this guy's never dealt with users. If there's a way to screw up a system, even a dumb terminal, they WILL find a way.

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.

Then Pay the Market Wage

[Anonymous Coward]

If you pay the market (equilibrium) wage, then you will find plenty of workers. However, most companies, just like your company, refuse to pay the market salary. They then cry, "There is a shortage of workers!"

F77/F90/F95 aren't on the list.

[i_like_spam]

Yeah! Does that mean that my FORTRAN programming skills are still marketable?

"What will the language of the year 2000 look like? Nobody knows, but it will be called FORTRAN." John W. Backus

Memory Tuning

[bobdehnhardt]

Back in the days of DOS, when everything had to fit in 640KB RAM (give or take), the ability to load device drivers into UMBs and High Memory. Now there were tools you could use, like QEMM or memmaker in MS-DOS 6, but Real Admins did it by hand.

I carried a specially tuned DOS disk around with me, and would whip it out whenever anyone complained that a certain program wouldn't load. Boot off the floppy (with around 630KB conventional memory available after all drivers loaded), run the program with no problem, deliver the classic "It works for me" tech support line, slip the boot disk back into my pocket, and leave the user convinced they're doing something wrong.

Ah, good times, good times....

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

I'm more concerned with dead USER skills

[sootman]

1) knowing what extensions are
- Both the fact that that they exist in the first place AND what the different ones mean--"ooh, should I click on hotsex.jpg.doc.exe.scr.pif?"

2) looking at the URL in the status bar before clicking on a link
- Apple: I love you, but you SUCK for having the status bar off by default in Safari.

3) knowing where downloaded files go
- Every phone-based support call I've ever made:
a) Painfully (see #4) navigate to a URL.
b) Painfully (see #5) instruct user to download a file.
c) Spend 5 minutes telling them where that file is on their computer

4) the difference between \ and /
- these people saw a backslash ONCE in their lives while using DOS about twenty years ago, and now every time I tell them an address, it's "Is that forward slash or backslash?" (Despite the fact that I've told them a million times that they'll pretty much NEVER see a \ in a URL.) This is usually followed by the question "Which one is slash?" God damn you, Paul Allen.

5) the difference between click, right-click, and double-click
"OK, right click on My Computer... no, close that window. Now, see the mouse? Press the RIGHT BUTTON..."

6) the concept of paths, root directories, etc.
- I why do I have to explain fifty times a day how to get from example.com/foo to example.com?

Admins can get whatever skills they want--they picked the career, thy can accept the fact that things change. The backends are usually handled by people with some know-how. It's the end-users that cause all the problems. It'd be like driving in a world where people didn't know how to use turn signals, didn't check their blind spots, didn't know they shouldn't talk on the phone while making complicated maneuvers--oh, wait, bad example.

Re:They said something else.

[Opportunist]

To quote my Guru: "When you learned C, and you mastered it, you have learned every (procedural) language there is, for it is easier to take a step down rather than up."

It's pretty much true. Look at the other languages you "should" learn today. Perl, PHP, Python, C#, Java... When you know your C well, learning them is fairly easy.

I highly disagree with number 9!

[Opportunist]

A good network admin is sought after. And he will never be out of a job.

Notice the "good" in the above statement, please!

Unfortunately, network admins have already suffered for years from what we (programmers) are facing now: Clueless wannabes flooding the market. Sounds harsh, is harsh, but it's sadly true. Everyone who can spell TCP/IP and doesn't think it's the Chinese secret service calls himself a net admin. And since human resources usually can't tell a network cable from a phone cable, they hire the ones with the cutest looking tie. Or the one with the most unrelated certificates.

Quite frankly, I have met so many people who claim to be net admins who know even LESS about networks than me. And I can barely cable my home net, and I can't solve the retransmission issues with my game machine that clog it. I do expect a lot from a net admin, granted, but for crying out loud, it's their JOB to know more about networks than I do, or I could do it myself!

What you get today as a "network administrator" is some guy who can somehow, with a bit of luck, good fortune, a graphical interface and a step-by-step guide from the 'net, get the DHCP server on a Win2003 Server up and running. Don't bother trying to get a static IP or even a working DNS server from him. Not to mention that he'll look blankly at you when you ask him about splitting the 'net into smaller chunks. Anything in a netmask other than 00 or 0xFF (sorry: 0 and 255) is alien to him.

That's not what I call a network administrator. That's what I call a clickmonkey.

True network administrators who got more than an evening school degree are still rare. And they will have a job, with companies that know what to look for in a net admin.

But the plague spreads. Recently we hired a "programmer" who doesn't know the difference between heap and stack. Or why inserting an inline assembler line of INT3 could do some good for his debugging problem.

And we wonder about buffer overflow issues and other security problems in code? I stopped wondering.

a few hundred million in marketing gets customers

[Locutus]

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

Re:Ha! C != performance

[v01d]

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.

Re:They said something else.

[fishbowl]

How do you get out of university without taking an architecture course that gives some assembly language, at least for a hypothetical machine?

If you claim to have a BS in CS at the interview table, but didn't suffer through, e.g., a computer organization course (like Hennessy and Patterson style, which is common these days), didn't have a course where you developed an operating system, didn't design a language starting from BNF and build a compiler for it, didn't take 2 years of a lab science, didn't at least come close to a math minor, didn't have at least 4 courses at various levels of discrete math, automata, algorithm analyis, and didn't have a course that, as a final project, you deliver a significant user app in a high level language (on the order of an original multiplayer game, let's say)... I'd say your school has some explaining to do.

Seriously, what school can you go to and somehow avoid having a significant background in several languages and paradigms, including but certainly not limited to asm, C, and either C++ or Java, if not both? I don't expect everyone to take an elective where they compare Lisp, Scheme, Ruby, Haskell, and Icon. And I realize that there's often a variety of senior-year choices, and some people don't take Databases choosing HighPerf/Parallel/Distributed computing, say, or 3D Graphics. But there are some basic things that you'd better have done, or else, despite having the piece of paper hanging on your office wall, you're not done with school!

COBOL is not a skill

[glwtta]

Neither are C, ColdFusion, or NetWare certification - programming and software design are skills, as is network administration; what they list are called tools.

Re:I agree totally.... BUT

[Money for Nothin']

Why can't we keep writing efficient code, run it on the faster modern machines, and have things actually GO FASTER?

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...

Re:Amateur's make me laugh.

[KingSkippus]

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:

Me: The Notes client truly sucks as an e-mail client. It doesn't adhere to any OS's standard conventions, and it crashes a lot.
Them: Well, Notes does kind of suck on the client side, but the servers are where it counts, and it's really stable.
Me: Okay, well explain to me why we have at least one or two servers crash every week, and we have to schedule a reboot once a week then. Oh, and what happened to my e-mail? It's all gone!
Them: Oh, sometimes databases just eat themselves. Don't worry, I'll restore everything up through last night from backup. But the rest of the time, it's stable! And besides, it's more than just an e-mail system. It's also a database!
Me: Oh! Well, in that case, I have these two related tables that I need to store in an--
Them: It's not a relational database, just a database.
Me: Come again?
Them: You can't actually relate the information from one table in another. They're just flat tables. No relations.
Me: So, for most practical purposes, it's just a storage bucket that can't do what even Microsoft Access can then?
Them: Oh, it can do rapid application development too, though. Yeah, it's a development environment, that's the ticket!
Me: Oh! In that case, I'd like to create some kind of form where I can enter this information and store it. Then when I click that button, send an e-mail to those people with the information in it.
Them: No problema.
Me: Okay, that's a title, so it needs to be bold text--
Them: Oh, that's a rich text field.
Me: Yeah, so how do I code up a rich text field?
Them: Well, that's kind of a beast. You can't really code it up directly, you have to create another object to store the information in and... Well... I don't really understand rich text fields myself. It's best just to avoid them. Even professional Notes developers know that.
Me: So, it sucks as an e-mail system, it sucks as a database system, I can't even send out a frickin' formatted e-mail... Is there anything Notes does do well? Anything at all?
Them: Oh, yes! Replication and security!
Me: Fuck you. I'm using Gmail account.

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.

Re:I agree totally.... BUT

[swilver]

Actually, I think it's not as bad as you think -- you assume that a 10 times faster CPU actually performs 10 times faster in every way, unfortunately it usually means that the CPU wastes 10 times more cycles waiting on stuff. Yes, there are lots of things that used to take 20 cycles that now take 4000 cycles, but mostly those things are not time-critical anyway (like user interaction, anything that has to access the network or harddisk -- webservers spring to mind). For example, does it really matter if my GUI code runs in 20 cycles vs 4000 cycles? No, it won't make any difference at all -- the bottle neck here is how fast a user can click (and how fast the graphic card can render all those "special" effects users seem to love these days). Optimizing that code to run in 20 cycles won't give any performance increase at all -- optimizing it would not only be a waste of time, but would be like fixing something that already works -- the best case you can hope for is to get a faster piece of code with as much bugs as the original.. usually however it will introduce new bugs.

Now let's take this a bit further -- how much of a performance hit do you take when you access memory that is not in the CPU's cache (or 2nd level cache)? The CPU will have to wait for the memory to be available... optimizing code that frequently accesses memory outside the cache would be useless (and would just mean the CPU has to wait a bit longer). Let's take quicksort, the algorithm isn't particularly hard but accesses memory a lot. Would it matter if one iteration takes 20 cycles or 40 cycles on a modern CPU (let's assume that's the difference between C and Java)? It will make little difference, the CPU has to wait for data anyway. In the end, even in such a low level algorithm, it will make little difference whether we used a very efficient piece of code, or a slightly less efficient one -- the bottleneck is the memory. In other words, as long as the algorithm you use is the same, both pieces of code should be about as efficient.

The only time optimizing is still worth it is when you are doing stuff in tight loops that isn't randomly accessing memory for all kinds of reasons (and which of course is used to do a lot of bulk processing, like video encoding) -- it's hard to even think of a good example, but I suppose it might be worth using more efficient code in signal processing, compression/decompression and rendering applications. Even in those cases however a lot of stuff is handled in optimized libraries for higher level languages.. I mean, it won't make any difference if I use Bash (horribly inefficient!) to call my favourite Unzip program to unzip a multi-megabyte file, or whether I wrote a C program to do the same. It would still take as long.

BAH - 10 already-dead skills...

[bscott]

0. Tweaking IRQs on PC clones to let soundcards work with any other card
1. Knowing how to drop certain types of home comupter to re-seat the chips
2. Inserting 64k RAM chips with your bare hands to expand memory
3. Cutting a notch in 5-1/4" floppies to use the other side
4. Adjusting graphics by hand to NTSC-legal colors for decent video output
5. Editing config.sys to push drivers into HIMEM in order to free up memory
6. Crimping your own RJ45 connectors to save money
7. PEEK and POKE locations to do cool stuff on the Commodore 64
8. Manually configuring a SLIP connection to connect to the Internet (in pre-Winsock days)
9. Removing adjectives and punctuation from code comments to fit into 1k of RAM

Re:I agree totally.... BUT

[Alioth]

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.

Re:They said something else.

[rs79]

"You got a big gray beard, too?"

No, I'm clean shaven and have all of my long blond hair. I like long walks on the beach and pina coladas. I'm good with kids and dogs.

You better be a chick, bitch.