Embarrassing Skills

No, this is not a post about shop-lifting or any other such antisocial skill. Besides, this is a blog about technology so expect me to refer to technical skills.

Logic would dictate that any skill remotely related to programming would be a feather in the hat of developers. After all, the more a developer knows the more valuable he/she could potentially be to a project, right? Unfortunately, many who became software developers after the birth of the web have decided that certain programming related skills are so shameful they will feign or pursue ignorance of them at all costs.

This avoidance of knowledge has let to some of the most inefficient and jumbled projects ever. But, before examining what kind of jumble can result from such attitude, let's name some names.

HTML
When presented with this acronym, many a developer will state the obvious: HTML is not a programming language. Bingo! It is not, neither is Postscript or Tex. Now it is kind of ridiculous that members of the generation that grew up making joke websites is so anti-HTML that they refuse to acknowledge the very existence of what has become the fastest growing display markup language. I am not leveraging this criticism of developers whose applications live on the desktop or on embedded systems. Such developers have their own user interface issues to worry about. If you write strictly Swing, MFC, Cocoa, or X11 applications and you do not know the first thing about HTML fine.

I am speaking of developers whose applications live on the web who cannot tell whether their applications are outputting the right kind of markup. That they would consider their ignorance (real or fake) to be a virtue, makes their attitude that more egregious. A J2EE or ASP .NET developer who does not know HTML is like a C++ developer who believes he/she is above learning about #defines or compiler switches.

JavaScript
This one is a favorite language to hate for many J2EE developers. The irony of it all is that, for better or for worse, Java is the closest relative to JavaScript. It's fair to say that JavaScript is as related to (or descended from) Java as Java is to C++. Yet, I have not met any C++ developers who disavow any knowledge or use of Java. For all of its flaws and poor structure, JavaScript is not likely to be replaceable as the web's premier scripting language in the same way that SQL will remain the premier database scripting language way into the future.

XML
This one is more an issue of prejudice since many developers don't seem to understand that, for the foreseeable future, there will always be need for heterogeneous systems to communicate over networks and that binary objects sent over multiple hops are too susceptible to corruption to be reliably transported. Also, in the case of XML, most developers that hate it just don't get it; the principle of serialization is lost on them.

Language
I mean language as in Human languages. The be more specific, written human languages. The truth about our profession is that we are creating systems that interact with humans in more complex ways. These systems will need to be more user-friendly at least and, in some cases, even human-like.

If you are a developer who thinks it is cool to not know stuff, remember that you will suffer from any technology you depend on professionally that you do not understand. Knowledge, my friend, is power — and, on rare occasions, it is also job security.

If you are a lead developer or project manager and you notice any of the above attitudes among your team, nip it in the bud because such behavior will eventually hurt your projects.