Housekeeping

In programming, one trend is the removal of "housekeeping" tasks.

The transition from assembly language to high-level languages saw the elimination of register and stack frame management. This was a big change, but not the only change in housekeeping tasks. FORTRAN and COBOL eliminated a lot of housekeeping for files.

The C programming language (and the UNIX operating system) made file operations even easier, allowing the command shell to handle files for the "stdin" and "stdout" channels.

The introduction of Java saw the elimination of memory management. Prior languages (C, C++, and Pascal) forced the programmer to allocate, track, and release memory. (The early Pascal had a very clumsy "mark and release" model.) Every language introduced after Java has included memory management.

Eliminating housekeeping tasks is usually a good thing. There are some specialized applications that require the complete control of memory allocation, file operations, and even register allocation. But these applications are few. For the mainstream, less housekeeping is better. Housekeeping distracts us from the problem at hand.

Once eliminated, we don't re-introduce housekeeping tasks. We're not going to use (with any degree of popularity) a language that requires us to track and free memory, or jump through hoops to perform file operations, or to manually specify register usage. Future languages will keep the automatic transmissions that we have built.

Which means that the hard-won skills for housekeeping in languages -- even modern languages -- has limited usefulness. Memory allocation skills in C++ were not needed in Java or C#. (It may be useful to know them, to understand the actions occurring "under the hood", but it is not necessary.)

Housekeeping skills have limited life. Skills of longer duration are of lasting value. These include algorithm design, simplification of code, understanding business requirements, communicating with team members (technical, artistic, and management members), project management, cost estimating, and problem diagnosis.

So... what kind of skills do you have?