Friday, May 25, 2007
What I know about the top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills
A ComputerWorld article (via /.) lists "The top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills."
It's a real blast from the past. As a programmer from the early 90s I have experience with almost all of these technologies. The only ones I'm missing are #3 Non-IP networks and #4 cc:Mail.
It's a real blast from the past. As a programmer from the early 90s I have experience with almost all of these technologies. The only ones I'm missing are #3 Non-IP networks and #4 cc:Mail.
- 1. Cobol: Took a course as an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon. Fortunately, as it was my last semester prior to graduation, I did poorly in the class and was not tempted to make Cobol programming a career.
- 2. Nonrelational DBMS: For several years, I was an Omnis programmer, using its built-in hierarchical DBMS schema. Then, it became a front-end for Oracle and other DBs, and finally faded into obscurity.
- 5. ColdFusion: They still teach this at Harvard. In 2005 I took an extension class on web databases and learned ColdFusion development. I'm still doing some work with it, mainly because I believe Adobe's still alive and kicking with Flex/Flash/CS3/etc., not to mention the upcoming version of ColdFusion, codename "Scorpio." Nevertheless, I've tried to cover my bets by installing a few frameworks in PHP and getting familiar with Python and ASP.
- 6. C programming: Another CMU-era skill. Again I balked at becoming a C programmer, mostly because everything I was interested in doing was so much easier using the aforementioned Omnis.
- 7. PowerBuilder: Probably the top reason you've never heard of Omnis is because PowerBuilder outflanked, outplayed and outlasted Omnis almost everywhere I cared to look. "Today, PowerBuilder developers are at the very bottom of the list of in-demand application development and platform skills," according to the Computerworld article.
- 8. Certified NetWare Engineers: Back in 1994-1995 plotting my next move, I wanted the red-hot CNE certification. My company wouldn't pay for it, and neither would I. Instead, I went for an MBA.
- 9. PC network administrator: Another one of my earlier roles that I'm happy to have relinquished.
- 10: OS/2: I'm one of the few people in my cohort who's written a REXX script for OS/2. We used an OS/2 environment to host a PCAnywhere server for remote file access to a certain client, and there was a process we wanted to automate using the OS/2 scripting language.
Labels: Japan, softdev, web design
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