One of DDJ's more unique and endearing qualities is the affinity that exists between the magazine's readers, writers, and editors. This kindred spirit is one of the things that makes DDJ special. But the downside of a relationship like this is that we're all touched much more deeply by any loss. Such is the case with the death of Kent Porter, our senior editor who passed away the first week in June. His unexpected death leaves all of us -- those who were used to seeing him every day and those of you who had grown used to hearing from him every month -- with an empty feeling.
Kent was a special person whose association with DDJ goes back many years -- first as a reader, then as a contributor, and finally as a staff editor. Most recently, Kent wrote about graphics programming, an area that was a particular interest of his. Before that, he authored the "Structured Programming" column where he became known as an advocate for Modula-2, Pascal, and clear thinking in general. And, over the years, he wrote dozens of articles for DDJ and just about every technical magazine in the programming field. Add his more than 20 books (most of them on various aspects of programming, although his first book was entitled Building Model Ships From Scratch) and you begin to see just how prolific and disciplined he was. To a great extent, Kent's technical prowess, sense of humor, and clarity of expression embodied the notion of what DDJ is all about.
Programming was just one of Kent's many interests. He could speak six or seven languages (nope, not programming languages, he started learning Italian shortly before his death) and, believe it or not, he was an accomplished "needlepointer" who made up his own designs. As lucky as we were to know and work with Kent, he felt he was lucky too. He recently told former DDJ editor Ron Copeland that he was doing what he had always dreamed of when he was growing up -- writing books and magazine articles. He added that working at DDJ was the most satisfying job he'd ever held. While that certainly makes us feel better now, it's more gratifying to know that Kent was happy and satisfied with what he was doing.
Although his column will end with this month's issue, Kent had a couple of articles we hadn't gotten around to publishing, and those will see the light of day over the coming months. He'd also just finished updating his excellent book on Stretching Turbo Pascal, and I hope you'll be seeing it in the bookstores before long.
As a lasting memorial to our friend, we're in the process of setting up a scholarship fund in Kent's name. It will be an annual award to a deserving computer science student, and I'll be providing more details on it in a future issue.
In last month's editorial, I mentioned that we're providing listings via an on-line service built by David Betz and Bill Garrison. The response was great, with several hundred of you using the service to download files throughout the month and we're continuing to expand the available material. Again, the number is 603-882-1599. Dial it up and send us some e-mail with your comments.
Those Macintosh aficionados among us, like John Kirkpatrick of Houston and Grant Schampel of St. Paul, have commented that it's been a couple of months or so since we ran a Mac article. The reason for the dearth is that we've been stockpiling Mac articles for another special issue named Dr. Dobb's Macintosh Journal, which is due out next month. The first thing you'll notice about the issue is that it is packed with code. One article, in fact, has over 1800 lines of code while another has about 1000 lines. The articles range from discussions of device drivers and memory management to object-oriented and 32-bit color programming. In the process of putting the special issue together, we've also been able to assemble a good selection of additional code-intensive Mac articles that we'll be running in the regular DDJ just about every month.
Copyright © 1989, Dr. Dobb's Journal