And the Winner Is
by Larry O'Brien
The year began with a war, ended with the disbanding of the Soviet Union, and featured a lingering recession. All in all, a good year to hunker down at a computer, learn new skills, and wait for things to settle out. Which, according to every source, is pretty much what the software development community did.
According to Microsoft, 95% of programmers using Microsoft C are programming for Windows. Borland sold hundreds of thousands of object-oriented Windows-capable compilers, challenging programmers to tackle both learning curves simultaneously. Our own surveys show that many of you spent the year buckling down and doing exactly that.
Other than some exciting tools for Windows development, it was a pretty stagnant year. Almost all our .awards this year go to product upgrades. We looked across the board, at DOS, Macintosh, UNIX, OS/2, and Windows, and found either a lack of interest or, mostly, technology demonstrations, hand-waving, and alpha versions of great products due out in 1992.
Luckily, there were some exceptions. This year's Computer Language Productivity and Jolt Product Excellence winners are uniformly high-quality tools nominated by readers, winnowed by the editors, technical editors, and consulting editors of Miller Freeman Inc.'s software development magazines, and ultimately selected by a panel consisting of UNIX Review's Andrew Binstock, Embedded Systems Programming, Tyler Sperry, myself, and Alan Zeichick of AI Expert and The Mathematica ]ournal.
The selections are, undoubtedly, idiosyncratic and reflective of the biases and interests of the different groups along the selection path. It would have been safer and easier for us to run Reader's Choice awards, but we feel that style of award emphasizes the popular at the expense of the good. Not that the popular is necessarily not a worthy product—the two most nominated products were Borland International's C++ and Microsoft Corp.'s Visual Basic, products we recognized as having "jolted the industry."
Computer Language presents two awards. The Computer Language Productivity Award recognizes the productivity gain realized by using the product. The Computer Language ]olt Product Excellence Awards go further than the Productivity Awards. These awards are presented to products that show uniform excellence and that did, or should have, jolted the industry.
They represent a change in the way we think about software development and its fundamental building blocks. While the Productivity Award winners may be of interest only to the programmers who happen to use the language in question, Jolt winners are products you ignore at your peril.
The business of software development is changing rapidly. Remaining as up-to-date as possible with a broad set of skills is the only way you'll be prepared for the surprises of tomorrow. Assumptions that seem as much a fact of life as the Soviet Union might prove to be false.
If you did spend this past year learning object orientation, event-driven programming, and more professional methods for quality assurance and maintenance, you did the right thing. These are times when your flexibility and increased knowledge can pay off as a competitive advantage. The right techniques with the right tools—that's what Computer Language is all about.
Computer Language, April 1992
JOLT COLA The sweet caramel taste. The sticky, enamel-scouring residue on the teeth. The near-instantaneous blast of natural cane sugar. And, ultimately of course, the skin-tingling good times as "twice the caffeine" hits the bloodstream. The joys of Jolt Cola. "Soft drinks were never intended to be health food," says C.J. Rapp, bless his high-strung little heart. "We refuse to mask our product's benefits behind newfangled corn syrup or fruit juices." Recently, some vocal posters on CompuServe have claimed that it's impossible
for small companies to compete with the major players. A startup company in
.a market that common wisdom labeled impenetrable, Jolt surged to multimillion
dollar status quickly. "The Switch is On," claims Jolt Cola, and
they can point to 30% annual sales growth to prove it. Jolt Cola is the iconic
beverage of round-the-clock intellectual endeavors. It's colorful, individualistic,
and a little irreverent—not a bad cosponsor for our software development
awards. |
