Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2004-11-13 15:33:50 - Graham Ellis
Ten years ago, I was teaching languages like Shell Scripting and C, but the requirement faded. As computers became steadily more powerful, standard applications were developed by a few, to be used by the many, rather than each of the many having specific code written for them.
So now, I'm teaching languages like Perl and PHP which are being used as "glueware" to connect data that's going in and out of other pieces of software and is in other standard formats. I finished a Perl course yesterday evening and there we were talking CGI, HTML, XML, SQL, Apache. POD, Makefiles and other such components and using Perl as the link. What would have taken a week to write, test and develop 10 years ago now takes just a morning.
But if goes further - is there really a need to write a great deal of code at all? The web site on which I'm publishing this article is using a standard (Perl) package for the purpose, and a standard (Perl) package for the Forum that's also here. We're using a standard (PHP) piece of code to identify which country a user is located in when they visit the site .... and a standard database to hold library book information.
So is a programming knowledge and skill still useful? Yes, utterly. In interfacing the different applications. In providing "mods" and tailorings for them. I've just written a short piece of code to allow posters on "opentalk" to use the same email address to post comments to "The Horse's Mouth" without having to await approval, and another bit of special code added mean that new articles here are automatically referred to be relevant pages on our main site.
Looking ahead, I see myself teaching more and more "interfacing" type courses, and getting involved with pieces of code / modules that talk to more and more standard packages. SMB, OS Commerce, Moveabletype, YaBB, Maxmind, Plone ...