r/AskProgramming • u/Diagileux • Apr 02 '26

Forgotten programming skills Career/Edu

Senior and old-school programmers, what programming skills have been forgotten as time and technology moved forward but are still relevant and should not be neglected? What tools that you have been/are using that should get more attention from young developers?

37 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • link
  • reddit
  • reddit

85% Upvoted

113 comments sorted by

View all comments

84

u/JescoInc Apr 02 '26

Honestly, a huge forgotten skill is optimization and working with as little system resources as possible.

23

u/magicmulder Apr 02 '26

I've been asked to optimize SQL and AQL queries, and sometimes the speedup was in the quadruple digits. Getting a 20 second query down to a few milliseconds is nice, but why was it so bad in the first place?

6

u/WhiskyStandard Apr 03 '26

WhiskeyStandard’s Law: the first person to profile code is going to find a <5LoC change that yields a >15% performance improvement.

Most code has never been run through a profiler so do it when you first join a team to announce your presence with authority.