RUNNING LIGHT
Editor
I've written before in this space about the tyranny of time. Not about real-time, mind you, but about deadlines and schedules and the three month schism between magazine time and reality, and how that makes most editors a little wonky by the time they close an issue. Given this shared background, I trust you'll understand when I spend a little time talking about this year's West Coast Computer Faire, an event that is a week past for me, and at least two months past as you read this. As usual, the most interesting things are signposts for what's up ahead.
As either punishment for past sins or undeserved good fortune (I'm still not sure which) I was roped into being the moderator of the "Language Wars" panel. The audience looked to be your average computer faire crowd--just average folks, dressed in T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers. Make that your average programming folks, since over half the audience said they programmed for a living.
The panel speakers included Ray Duncan (ex-DDJ columnist and friend of the DDJ family), Jim Anderson (from Digitalk), Greg Lobdell (from Microsoft), and David Intersimone (from Borland). Given that the majority of the panel members were language purists, and that the audience seemed evenly divided into Basic, C, and Pascal camps, we didn't spend much time on the religious issues of picking the "One True Programming Language." Instead, we spent most of the afternoon discussing language and implementation features--what programmers want and need in compilers. Here are some of the highlights:
- Microsoft had just conducted some extensive marketing research on the QuickBasic users. They weren't quite expecting the results they got: over 30 percent of the QB programmers surveyed were using the product in the primary job function. So much for the death of Basic.
- David Intersimone stressed the importance of debugging in his talk. Although he wouldn't make any "official" announcements of products, it's a safe bet we'll see integrated debugging from Borland within a month or two of this issue.
- Jim Anderson did spend some time talking about the advanced debugging his company was putting into Smalltalk/286, the new protected mode version of Smalltalk/V that should have shipped last month as you read this. (I warned you that timing was tricky, didn't I?) As soon as the Digitalk crew polishes off the 286 version, they'll be putting the same debugging tool into a new product, Smalltalk/Mac.
- Your fearless editor cautioned the audience not to confuse the merits of a particular language with the merits (or failings) of a particular implementation. Specifically, I noted that despite C's supposed "inherent efficiency," the latest crop of Modula-2 compilers were surpassing both Borland's and Microsoft's C compilers in benchmarks. Look for more on Modula-2 in Kent Porter's column in the coming months.
As usual, you can reach me online with your comments on languages, suggestions, and article ideas in a number of ways: on BIX as "tyler," on GEnie as "T.SPERRY," and on CompuServe with the catchy number 76703,4266. Those of you enamored with the Unix system and uucp will be pleased to learn that DDJ is finally online, thanks to the efforts of Phil Sih down at Portal Communications in Cupertino. Unix mongers can now reach me as sun!cup. portal.com!tyler.
Tyler Sperry editor