Once again, I go for a significant length of time without any postings. The primary cause is work; been swamped, blah blah. Anyway, during my rare downtime I’ve been thinking that the content processing toolkit needs to make the leap into the modern era and be written as a web app. Queue learning of many new technologies and languages. Java, Ruby on Rails, etc. Not happy with any of them; don’t like having to constantly switch between languages, don’t like having to take two weeks to just get simple shit done with Java, blah blah the usual. Then comes the realization. The days of the ‘traditional’ programmer are very, very limited.
What I mean is that knowing just the traditional languages and paradigms isn’t going to cut it anymore. If you’re thinking in terms of traditional concepts like applications, clients, servers, and so on, pretty soon you’re going to be out of a job. The future is all about the production, manipulation and distribution of data. Useful functionality is built up is small bits, and every single one of those bits is connected. Networking functionality is absolutely core to everything. And it’s obvious that traditional languages and development techniques simply aren’t going to cut it.
This isn’t to say that being a proficient C/C++/C#/Java/whatever programmer isn’t useful – those skills are still essential. But it won’t be enough to save your ass in the coming years. You also need to be proficient in web technologies. JavaScript will be key. The browser isn’t the operating system of the future, but there isn’t going to be any distinction between a ‘browser’ and an ‘operating system’ – it’s all one and the same. I don’t know that the specific implementation of node.js is where it’s at, but I know it’s at least heading in the right direction. And it’s nice because I only can use the same language for ‘client’, ‘server’ and ‘tools’ (though there isn’t much distinction between them.) Time to get on with re-inventing myself and my skill set.
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