Linked by David Adams on Fri 11th Jul 2008 02:59 UTC, submitted by snydeq
Neil McAllister raises questions regarding Web development skills in an era of constant innovation. Sure, low barriers to entry give underdog technologies ample opportunity to thrive without the backing of name-brand vendors. But doesn't this fragmentation of the Web development market put undue pressure on developers to specialize? The result is a crisis, McAllister concludes, one in which maintaining a marketable skill set and hiring for a particular Web project gets more difficult as the state of the art changes on an almost daily basis.
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Member since:
2005-11-18
I think that, except if you need to ride the edge (e.g. if you are a "Web 2.0" company), it's best to be conservative and stay with what is proven to work well.
Hire programmers that master "stable languages" well, e.g. C/C++, Python, and Java. They can write higher level code and optimize it where necessary. They're probably going to be more useful than "Rails programmers" or "Sharepoint programmers".
Slowly, there are also winners emerging from previous "framework wars". While they may not be as conservative as writing code in PHP, or coding up a full web app by hand, they do provide a lot more productivity and provide useful abstractions. For instance, frameworks like Django seem up to the task.
It's great if a new framework shows you how to code a bookstore in a five minute screencast. But is it bug-free, does it perform well, is the API mostly frozen, will it be properly maintained in 5 years? Those are things that are going to count when you go are going further than a simple book store app.
Edited 2008-07-11 09:01 UTC