job market is that you really can't get experience without a job, and you can’t get a job without experience. It’s even worse in the technology sector: There are a lot of, quite bluntly, clueless HR and headhunters out there who don’t understand that someone who has programmed in C for over 20 years but has programmed in PHP for three months is probably a better programmer than someone who has programmed in PHP for a year, but has no other programming experience. Or heaven forbid, if a job candidate tells someone “OK, I’ve never programmed in Ruby, but I have programmed in C for 20 years, Perl for over 10 years, PHP for a couple of years, as well as a number of other programming languages. I’m sure I can pick Ruby in a day or two”; to a clueless HR person, the person can’t do the job if it has “Ruby” in the job title.
The fact of the matter is this: C is hard (free the mallocs, close the open sockets, no native string handling, etc.). DNS is hard. Recursive DNS is really hard. Thread-free recursive DNS is even harder. Thread-free recursive DNS in pure C is a downright pain in the butt. I have done some of the work that is in vogue right now: PHP and other scripting, as well as some GUI development. All of that is a cakewalk compared to the work I am doing in MaraDNS right now.
Asking someone who has written a fully recursive DNS server in C (and, for added benefit, is almost done rewriting said fully recursive DNS server to not use threads) whether they can write a PHP script or a GUI application is like asking someone who can drive a large truck with a manual transmission if they can drive a compact family car with an automatic transmission.
That said, one reason why some companies don’t like programmers with a lot of old-school experience is that they want younger people (it lowers health insurance premiums), or they feel that they can’t teach an old dog new tricks. In my case, I program in C (not C++, not Java, not Objective C, but plain old C) not because I like the language (I don’t; PHP and Python as well as Java are far easier to program in) but because there is a tradition in the open-source world of writing programs in plain C: It proves that the developer can do the truly hard programming.
I am an old dog, yes, but I can learn new tricks: I very quickly picked up PHP when I needed to use it, do use Python in MaraDNS (the BIND zone file converter is written in Python, and MaraDNS’ as well as Deadwood’s configuration files use Python-compatible syntax), and have been using Perl for over a decade. Programming languages have been getting easier to program in (I’m glad I don’t have to program in 6502 assembly any more), not harder, and a good programmer is a good programmer. Regardless of the language he is programming in.
