As time goes by I’m finding myself doing less and less programming. My recent foray into distributing QL and Z88 freeware has kept me busy collecting QL freeware. Now I will have the pleasure of trying some of this software out, which always takes some time. I’m still working on getting QFAX going (after having it for almost a year). For some reason QFAX did not talk well to my modem. I’ve been meaning to sit down and figure out the problem, but it has become one of those get-around-to-it’s.
The only programming I have been doing in some work in Perl. Perl is great for some Sys Admin work in Unix and I’ve written a few CGI-BIN scripts in Perl. I’m hoping to do Perl work full time.
A port of Perl to the QL may happen and I hope it does. Perl is a great language for quick programs. It’s got the speed of development of SuperBasic but with the power of C, awk, and SED.
In my browsing of the Web I’ve run across a web site dedicated to programming. Besides carrying information about a number of different languages, they also have a section on “classic” papers. I downloaded the following papers:
- What is “Object-Oriented-Programming”? by Bjarne Stroustrup
- Recommended C Style and Coding Standards
- How to Steal Code or Inventing The Wheel Only Once by Henry Spencer
The papers are stored in Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) format and need an Adobe viewer to view or print out.
I started reading Bjarne’s paper on OOP but have yet to sit down and go through it all. It discusses OOP by starting with procedural programming, then discusses data hiding, data abstractions, and them moves on to OOP. It looks like this may actually be the article I’ve been looking for, that really discusses OOP in relation to procedural programming.
I’ve always found other OOP articles that start of discussing OOP by defining the OOP terms but not relating them back to procedural programming. I need to see OOP in relation to something that I already know.
If you want to visit the site, it’s at:
http://www.strangecreations.com/strange/
Using an older form of browsing, I was looking through my local library and ran across a book by P. J. Plauger. Mr. Plauger used to own Whitesmiths, a C compiler vendor, and has contributed to “Computer Language” and “C Users Journal” magazines. The book is called “Programming on Purpose III” and is a collection of “Programming on Purpose” columns he wrote for “Computer Language.” The topics all deal with software technology, while the other two books deal with software design and software people.
The articles have some good things to say. They cover a wide variety of topics and are good idea generators. Some of the better articles covered technical writing, maintaining code, text editors, and user interface issues. I’m hoping that the library has the other two books as I am sure that they are worth the read.
I’d like to end with one final note; when I started the QHJ I had hoped that most of the articles would come from you, the readers, but I was not so lucky. As it is taking me longer and longer to produce each issue, I would like to make a request to some of you might take pity of me in my plight and pen a few words for this one-man zine.