Dead end tools and technologies you wished you hadn't bothered with

[Moscow Mule]

JWalk.

Pile of old cack.

[the_duderama]

COMAL - did it at school, look it up, cross between basic and pascal.

[swamp]

I don't know EJB is out-dated, unless you mean versions prior to 3 before they fixed it.

copied Hibernate

[d000hg]

copied Hibernate

EJB3 is a database persistence management tool? 3 is the same idea as 2, but with far less bindings and messing about, as far as I recall.

[Lockhouse]

Sybase EA Server (Jaguar)

[d000hg]

8086 assembler...

Come on, that was a useful skill for a couple of decades (at least) if you knew where to go. It died out of most mainstream projects but hung on for years in high-performance niches... the same way they still use C in the core parts of trading systems, where every ms is worth big bucks when relaying information (or so the people who work on it say). PC-based games were still using some ASM quite recently, and probably still are since no mainstream compilers are good enough to generate good SIMD code (also used in signal processing and stuff).

[NickFitz]

occam doesn't seem to be much used now

There are quite a few things that are of no practical value to me now, but that I'm still glad I bothered with (e.g. 6502 Assembly Language, Forth, RISC OS, ARM Assembly Language).

Unfortunately the one technology I wish I'd never had to have any dealings with just refuses to die. I'm looking at you, Microsoft® Windows™

[zamzummim]

Instead of listing the old useless tools, how about talking about hot new tools to learn...where's Milan, he should know.

[xoggoth]

I did Modula 2 for a while.

I am slightly annoyed that only a few months ago I chucked out a book on Symbian programming that I brought to develop for the Psion some years ago only to discover recently that the latest Nokia phones use Symbian.

[expat]

...
Any others here a specialist in learning dead-end technology?

IT.