Even though 1989 is still a few months off, we've been planning the topics you'll be reading about in DDJ in the coming year and, based on what you've been telling us, we think you'll like some of the topics we'll be covering. As the following editorial calendar illustrates, 1989 will see us examining developments on topics we've covered before (realtime programming, for example) and taking an in-depth look at subjects, like windowing systems, that are becoming increasingly important to programmers
Although we've already started lining up articles on many of these topics (particularly those for the early part of the year), we'll still welcome ideas for specific articles you'd like to see. And if you'd like to write an article, so much the better. Just give me a call or drop me a letter describing what you have in mind.
What sort of articles are we looking for? We'll consider something on any of the above topics as well as articles about programs or utilities you've developed that will solve a particular programming problem. Stewart Nutter's "An Aid To Documenting C" in August, Ray Moon's September piece on "Arguments and Automatic Variables in Assembly Language," and Steve Heller's feature entitled "A Double Cross for MASM" in this issue, are all excellent examples of the kind of task-specific articles I have in mind.
But just because many of our features are DOS and C related, don't (falsely) assume that those are the only topics we want to cover; we'll give serious thought to proposals that relate to any topic that is important to programmers. (I'd like to see more articles dealing with Basic, for instance.) This includes articles covering non-DOS systems, especially the Macintosh. To digress on this point for a moment....
Over the past few months, I've been compiling the "Archives" column (found on page 8 in this issue), something I've enjoyed doing for a couple of reasons. For one thing, reading through back issues of DDJ helps me keep in mind why this magazine was started in the first place. For another, it seems that, no matter which issue I pick up, I always learn something new. Incidentally, if you have any favorite quotes from past issues, send them in and I'll include them in "Archives.")
In the process of compiling this month's Archives, I ran across a 1978 "Letter to the Editor" berating DDJ for spending too much time on 8080 based systems and not enough on 6502 and other such systems. It probably comes as no surprise to you that we hear the same complaint today--ten years later--the only difference being that the 8080-argument has evolved to the 80286/386 and the 6502-complaint is now the Macintosh environment. My response today is the same as then editor Tom Williams: "Fact is, we'd be more than happy to publish stuff on 6502s and others if folks would write it up and send it to us. Dr. Dobb's exists to help pass software around to the eager hands of users."
January Neural Networks
February Real-time & Embedded Systems Programming
March Windowing Systems
April Memory Management
May Structured Languages
June Operating Systems
July Graphics
August Annual C Issue
September Modeling & Simulation
October Telecommunications
November Parallel Processing
December Object-Oriented Languages