Hi FAR,
This is too easy, and perhaps a cheap shot, but:
After working very hard to get my Computer Science degree and
investing my own hard earnt money heavily in MSDN subscriptions and
perhaps you should invest in a few grammar lessons as well.
I began to
wonder if it had all been worthwhile now that the forthcoming ASP.Net
2.0 (Whidbey) seems to be abstracting much of the techniques that I
had learnt to "hand code".
oh, gosh, did we forget to tell you? Everything you learn is obsolete in
three years.
What an oversight! Quick, let's find someone who will refund all that money
you spent on your education.
Look, if you wanted to study something that would be applicable 20 years
from now, you really should have picked art history (no offense to art
historians intended). I mean, think about it. Every field changes. Some
more quickly than others, but I'm hard pressed to imagine a field that
doesn't change. (Even art history).
Silliness aside, the principles of computing change rather slowly. I wrote
a blog LAST WEEK that refers to topic in compiler theory that I learned, in
college, in 1982. Your education won't go to waste.
That said, some schmuck or another has been paying me to have fun, writing
software, for 24 years and counting. I'm still amazed that I can have so
much fun doing something that I get paid for... and as I look back on the
last 24 years, I cannot pinpoint a single two year period where I used the
same skills at the beginning of the two year period as I was using at the
end. No exceptions.
it does make me worry that the very systems that we use
to improve business efficiency could one day make the role of the
qualified developer redundant.
Wouldn't that be great! Wow! I'd love to fire all the "qualified
developers" and just keep the architects and designers around to design
solutions and "ping" they'd come into existence... complete with design bugs
and misconceptions about the requirements :-).
Ha!
The languages change, but the problems remain, because the problems aren't
in the language... they are in the people. And, one thing that doesn't
change: us.
Programmers of tomorrow won't do the same things as programmers of today.
There may be different titles, and different roles, and different
expectations, but there will ALWAYS be problem solvers who use technology
and mathematics and logic to craft solutions to problems that are so nuts,
only a human being could have originated them.
And you and I will be there to solve those problems.
So don't fret about Whidbey. If I were you, I'd fret about my grammar first
:-).
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--- Nick Malik [Microsoft]
MCSD, CFPS, Certified Scrummaster
http://blogs.msdn.com/nickmalik
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed in this forum are my own, and not
representative of my employer.
I do not answer questions on behalf of my employer. I'm just a
programmer helping programmers.
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