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

[Bruce Hoult]

On 7/10/07, nic <nic at tymar.com> wrote:
> I think the comment just reflects that most people don;t realise there's a world other
> than web apps or large corporate apps. Us poor embedded people often struggle with things
> like 8k (yes, kilo) bytes of RAM. C#, C++, Java, PERL, python, Erlang, etc. ain't gonna go
> there. And the bozos like the person quoted don't realise there are more embedded devices
> than any other sort of computing platform.

Vastly more.  A billion mobile phones a year, for a start.  At
Innaworks, we're writing development tools for them.  Blurb on what we
released last month here:

  http://www.innaworks.com/alcheMo.html

We're not having to deal with 8 bit (?) systems with 8 KB of RAM like
nic.  Thankfully it's 32 bit ARM/Thumb which is at least saner than
x86 and seems firmly entrenched in embedded devices (unlike 68k and
PPC in PCs ... sob).  But we have to help people to fit graphics-rich
high frame rate games onto machines with as little as 400 KB of RAM,
with as little as possible of that for the code.  It's like going back
to 1985 PCs, except people expect more now.

You bet we're writing a lot of stuff in C.  And some in assembler.
And some in Java that we translate to native code using our own
product :-)

p.s. if this sounds like fun to anyone you should talk to us...