Am I obsolete?

The last year or two has seen a rapid acceleration in the debut of new (or at least better-developed) toolkits for working with many languages. Most of these focus on web development, in particular “Web 2.0“.

These languages (Ruby, PHP, Javascript, CSS, etc), and web development in general, are not my forte. I am a low-level programmer, preferring to abstract from the machine no further than the semi-object-oriented nature of C++. However, the growing power and ubiquity of the many scripting-style languages, in combination with better libraries for such langauges, has lead many to question the future of the C programmer. Is C the new assembly?

While there will certainly always be a need for low-level programmers, I can’t help but wonder if my skillset is becoming somewhat outdated. I prefer to work in pointers and recursion, rather than with stylesheets and browser compatibility questions.

I can take comfort in one of Joel Spolsky’s essays, “The Perils of JavaSchools“. He recognizes that someone who can design a tail recursive, pointer-heavy function on the fly can probably learn Ruby on Rails with a minimal time investment.

I guess I should thank the UIUC CS Department for providing me with classes like CS225 – Data Structures and CS421 – Programming Languages and Compilers.