“Is DEAD” is DEAD
Why “x is dead” stories should be discarded
Enough already.
Friends, please raise your right hand and repeat after me… I will never again click on an article with “is DEAD” in the title.
Such articles seem to be written by terribly self-important young programmers, and by “young” I mean they’ve been coding for less than 20 years. They’ve never typed Hollerith cards or booted a computer by first toggling in octal or hex patterns from a pocket card. They’ve likely never written assembly code.
Worse, they are usually writing a JavaScript framework, which is about as near the top of the stack as one can imagine.
That is why we readers of Medium and Reddit need to stop obeying their clickbait. We should stop reading anything that says something popular and widely used “is DEAD.” Let's stick to our knitting of writing clean, easily refactored code n whatever language we want, knowing full well that computer languages never die. Fortran, COBOL, LISP, and PHP will always be with us.
The skills you learn in any programming language are generally applicable in any other language. If you’ve learned how to code in, say, Algol 60 or VBA, all you need to work in c or python is probably a one-page cheat sheet.
I’ve always admired the maxim “Code is Poetry.” You can google it and find lots of articles. I would suggest that all clickbait mongers spend some time reading these articles and reflecting on how they might bring more light and clarity into our world of software development. Chasing after the latest shiny object is probably one reason we have so much bloated and mediocre code in our world.
We call this “computer science” because it should be a science. Each step forward should build on the last — not kill it off. Appreciating that journey and the pioneers who got us here, and aspiring to add our little bit as it moves forward, should be our aspiration.
