[wellylug]The top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills

[Bruce Hoult]

On 7/10/07, Mian Lin <armislin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi , I just read the article from computerworld website,it listed "The
> top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills". I am surprised at "C
> programming" is on the list.
>
> what do you think, the people who are working in the industry ?

It's utter crap.

Feel free to check back and wave this in my face when we get to the
old folk's home, but I fully expect C to still be widely used when
almost everything else we use today (except Lisp) are dead and
forgotten.

Why?  Because it has most of the power of assembly language, along
with all the safety of assembly language, while lightening the mental
load of programming considerably compared to assembly language.  And
it's more or less portable.

C won't disappear until CPUs stop trying to look as if they run one
instruction at a time, in sequence.  At which point almost every
supposed C replacement language touted today (C++/ Java/ C#/ Perl/
Python/ Ruby/ JavaScript) becomes equally irrelevant.  At that point
we need something wildly different, not just surface different.
Prolog or Haskell, for example, or something not yet thought of.