Last month's reminiscence about past members of the DDJ family brings us to this month's introduction to Ray Valdes, DDJ's new technical editor. Ray joined DDJ just before Christmas and, from what I can tell, has pretty much adjusted to coming into an office on a regular basis. For the past few years, you see, Ray's been keeping his own hours as a contract programmer, working on projects ranging from MUMPS to C++ to HyperCard. His specialties, however, are high-end graphics and font technology, topics that go hand-in-glove with his background in graphic design.
If you want to talk with Ray about these or other topics, he can be reached here at the DDJ offices, or on MCI Mail and the DDJ Listing Service as Rvaldes. His CompuServe ID number will be forthcoming. We're happy that Ray has joined us and pleased with the immediate contribution he's made. You can look forward to seeing and hearing more from him in the future.
Speaking of last month's editorial, about the same time I was rooting through those early issues of DDJ and reminding myself of how the magazine began as a forum for Tiny Basic, Microsoft came to town with the release of MS Basic 7.0. Talk about contrasts. The source for Tiny Basic, which consisted of several hundred or so lines of code, was published in a few magazine pages. Basic 7.0, on the other hand, comes with over 2000 pages of documentation and, if you use all of the libraries, help systems, and the like (you don't have to use them all, only what you want) it will claim up to 14 or so Mbytes on your hard disk. Basic 7.0 includes new language features, an integrated environment, new optimization techniques, tools, threaded p-code technology, and on and on.
I'm not at all trying to compare the two, mole hills to mountains being what they are, but instead to point out how far computing and programming have come over a relatively short time. Not only is the software technology there to develop environments like 7.0, but also affordable hardware to support it.
Incidentally, for those of you Basic-kind-of-guys who wondered whatever happened to Borland's Turbo Basic, it has had some new life pumped into it by the folks at Spectra Software (aka PC SIG) and released under the name of PowerBasic. A bunch of new features have been added and if you're interested, give them a call at 408-730-9291.
Back in September, we published DDJ's editorial calendar for the first half of this year. Since we're already two months into that list, it's high time we finish it up.
If you have article ideas for any of these topics, give Mike, Ray, or me a call (415-366-3600) or drop us a note (c/o DDJ, 501 Galveston Dr., Redwood City, CA 94063, c/o DDJ on MCI Mail, or c/o 76704,50 on CompuServe).
As we expected, Scott Guthery's article "Are the Emperor's New Clothes Object Oriented?" (DDJ, December 1989) generated a lot of mail, pro and con. So much, in fact, that we're going to try to pull it all together into an article and continue the debate. Some of the responses have been long (Marshall Giguere's rebuttal was as long, if not longer, than Scott's original), others short and to the point. If there's anything you'd like to add, get it to us as quickly as possible. Or if you'd like to hold off and respond to the responses, that'll be fine too. It should be coming up in a couple of months.
And for those of you who have been wondering whatever happened to the Rhealstone real-time benchmark proposal follow-up we promised last year, Robin Kar has completed the code implementation. We should be running that article within the next two or three months as well.
January Real-time and July Graphics Programming
Embedded Systems Programming
February Windowing Systems August Annual C Issue
March Assembly Language Programming September Structured Languages
April Neural Networks October Operating Systems
May Memory Management November Object-Oriented
Programming
June Hypertext December Communications and
Connectivity