Departments

Editor's Forum

Them as can't do, teach. So goes the trusty truism, rendered with an aggressive disregard for grammar to distance the speaker from any personal hint of academic pretension. Indeed, in the hills of West Virginia from whence I sprang, it was common wisdom that too much education was bad for the brain. The locals could recite every school teacher in the past two centuries who had developed so much as a nervous tic. It was understood that a few souls had to sacrifice an otherwise useful life to provide the (limited) education needed by the more productive members of society.

It just doesn't work that way in our profession, at least not when things go right. The backbone of C/C++ Users Journal, like any good technical trade magazine, is the small cadre of people who write columns month after month. Yes, I am counted among that number — an old warhorse — but I'm talking here about my younger, livelier peers. I take credit for just a few of the good things about CUJ, but one of them is helping to select and nurture, over the years, our current crop of regular contributors.

When it comes to computer programming, you have to know what you're doing before you can guide others. The best advice comes from people who not only have been there and done that, but who keep going there and doing that on a regular basis. The best teachers are the doers who can also explain what it is they do right. And who know to keep rethinking what "right" is as technology roars ahead at ever increasing speed.

There is a drawback to having active columnists. Doers are busy people, and busy people get spread thin. Sometimes they miss deadlines. But I'd rather have a good writer in these pages ten months out of the year than a reliable hack month after month. I'll settle for even less than that, rather than lose a good columnist completely.

I put my money where my mouth is. Besides editing this magazine, I run a little software company called Dinkumware, Ltd., along with my wife Tana. As our business has grown over the past year or so, we've turned to others more and more to help us get things done. Bobby Schmidt is now on his third contract with Dinkumware. We recently signed Chuck Allison to do a project for us. Dan Saks developed a seminar on our Embedded C++ Library and delivered it to a major customer, with our eager cooperation. More recently, we took an even bigger step. We hired Pete Becker as our first employee.

It was natural to turn to these people. They have proven, over the years, that they know what they're talking about and that they deliver. My only concern is a second-order conflict of interest. If I keep them too busy, what do I say to Marc Briand when he tells me their copy is late? [Hmmph. So that's why Bobby's not in this issue. At least it's good to know we're keeping him off the streets. — mb]

P.J. Plauger
pjp@plauger.com
http://www.tiac.net/users/pjp
http://www.dinkumware.com