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Obsolete Technical Skills
Ponca City, We Love You writes "Robert Scoble had an interesting post on his blog a few days ago on obsolete technical skills — 'things we used to know that no longer are very useful to us.' Scoble's initial list included dialing a rotary phone, using carbon paper to make copies, and changing the gas mixture on your car's carburetor. The list has now been expanded into a wiki with a much larger list of these obsolete skills that includes resolving IRQ conflicts on a mother board, assembly language programming, and stacking a quarter on an arcade game to indicate you have next. We're invited to contribute more."
Systems programmers worth their salt can at least read assembler output. It's a valuable skill when debugging kernel errors.
Fortran isn't obsolete. It's still popular in particle physics. Also, "buying an HD-DVD" is on the list. Not that that was ever a "skill." This list is just begging to be filled with joke entries like that.
Navigating by compass is obsolete? That's like saying that keeping candles in your house in case of extended blackouts is obsolete.
Some things on that list are either silly or shortsighted.
Without assembly knowledge we'd have uncrackable IP "protection" schemes.
Churn butter is on the list. I guess it just comes that way out of the cow now. Science is amazing.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
I'm looking forward to the day when blogging becomes obsolete.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I design embedded systems for a living, and this obsolete assembly language skill is what distinguishes my designs from those other companies. True, it takes me a little longer to get the code done, but it runs faster, has more features, and fits into a much smaller memory space than what I could do with C, or anything else. (Not to mention the fact that all the bugs in my code are all mine and none were introduced by a compiler.) I feel like it's to my advantage that assembly has faded from most designer's skill set. I won't deny that this skill is on the endangered species list, but to group it with the skill needed to dial a rotary phone made me speak up. It may be rare but it certainly isn't useless.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
Using PEEK and POKE to 'unerase' that Apple II basic program someone erased when they accidentally typed 'NEW'. /S /AH /ON" without having to DIR /? first.
The skill to determine a modem's connect speed from hearing the negotiation sounds.
'Notching' an old single-sided floppy to be able to make it a double-sided disc.
Cleaning and/or aligning the heads on your cassette player.
Terminating or crimping coax.
Knowing you need to type "DIR
Was 'winding your watch' in the list?
I'd love to see some speculation on what skills you'd expect to be obsoleted by 2029.
There are probably many times more people capable of programming in assembly language today than in the 70s. Kernel developpers, compiler developers (obviously!), CPU designers, embedded systems developpers and so on.
On the other hand, there are many times less people capable of making horse buggies than in the XIXth century; that's obsolete.
As someone who uses many languages I can tell you this: All imperative languages can be learned in very reasonable time if you know your C. Everything is derived from C today, from PHP to Perl to Java. Why? Well, maybe because the guys who wrote those languages come from C.
In a nutshell, it doesn't matter what language you use, which language is the next big thing, or what language becomes obsolete tomorrow. You will probably not know all those fancy functions that do what you used to do by hand, but what matters is whether you know the math behind the code. I've seen so many people claiming to know Java, C# and whatnot, just to give me that incredibly blank stare when I ask them for hash tables. Yes, they know every function, every class in Java by heart, but they have no knowledge of what they should actually DO with it.
Now, it might not be a "necessity" tomorrow when there is a function that does it for you. But it is VERY easy to learn about a function (hell, look it up, it ain't like there's no online help file for it) while it is not so trivial to understand what it actually DOES.
So it does not matter what language will arise or what language becomes obsolete. What matters is that you know the theory behind the structures you're supposed to use. When you know that, you can understand what the functions and classes do. When you understand that, you can more efficiently and sensibly fill them. When you do that, your program will work with fewer bugs and fewer "why the fu.. doesn't that work now, it did last time" moments.
Don't learn languages. Learn theory!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I've been thinking about retiring - I'm 34 years old. I think I'd be happier if I'd jump off the bandwagon and started doing something totally different. Something that would not require me to study all the time and be stressed all the time.
I grew up with home computers. I learned BASIC when I was 11. That is obsolete skill now. Then I got my first PC in 1988 and learned DOS. That's obsolete. Then I learned Borland's Turbo Pascal. That's obsolete. Then I learned Microsoft C programming and started programming Windows 3.1 applications that used Windows menus etc. That's obsolete. I learned Gopher and Telnet in the 80s. That's obsolete. I learned Pine. That's obsolete. I learned to tweak Windows 95 registry. That's obsolete. I learned BEA Tuxedo at work. That's obsolete. Looking at it now - I've wasted countless of hours to something that is totally obsolete now! Had I invested that time into improving myself - learning who I am, how I behave, how to enjoy this life - I would be much happier now I guess.
Don't F**K with Chuck!
What strikes me as astonishing about this topic, other than the fact that the majority of the discussion seems to revolve around the utility of assembly programming, is that the list itself displays a marked lack of understanding of the ongoing utility of low technology devices. For instance, one of the items listed is "Buttoning one's trouser fly". Perhaps the author of that idea has never heard of Levi's 501 Jeans? I submit that the 501's are some of the most popular trousers in the world, and the skill of buttoning them could hardly be considered obsolete. The rest of the list is rife with items that only the most technologically-blinded among us could possibly think of as obsolete.
Even the summary contains a dubious suggestion, "Changing the gas mixture on your car's carburetor". Perhaps the author is unaware of the vast numbers of motorcycles and small engines sold each year that incorporate carburetors?
"Cast lead bullets"? Thousands, if not millions, of ammunition reloaders would disagree.
"Changing vacuum tubes"? Millions of musicians would disagree.
"Darkroom photography skills"? "Developing photographic film"? Obviously, this person is not a photographer!
That's as far as I can get without becoming even more disgusted with the state of humanity, or at least the supposedly tech-savvy people who probably are contributing to this list.