As the newly elected Publications Officer of the ACCU it seems to have fallen to me to fill this space at the start of this, the latest edition of Overload. What I should like to do is to start by endorsing the comments made in the last issue by our chairman, Alan Griffiths, and my predecessor, Francis Glassborow.
Let me also make it clear that John Merrells and his team have done an excellent job in developing Overload to the current position and I hope that they will continue to do so.
With regard to Alan's comments I should say that I fully agree that John and his team should receive all the recognition they deserve, as should everybody who contributes to our publications in whatever way, large or small. We rely on those people and I have no intention of allowing them to feel undervalued.
That said I do feel that the modification of the boundary between our publications instituted by the committee as part of the recent changes was important - splitting basic content from advanced content makes much more sense to me in terms of a separation for subscription purposes.
Of course the C++ material is still important and we have, in John and his team, an excellent resource to continue producing that material. The fact that speakers of international renown were happy to stand up at our conference and list Overload alongside commercial magazines as a best of breed publication is testament to that.
Other people will find C or Java material of a similar level of equal importance though - despite what some people might have you believe, many professional developers use C every day. I am one of them in fact. Well that and a somewhat mangled version of Fortran, but that is something I try not to think about too much...
We do have a naming problem, and that is unfortunate. With hindsight it might have been better to leave Overload as the name of the C++ section in our advanced level journal and give the journal itself another name. We did not though, hence the current name of Classic Overload for John's section.
To round off let me reiterate that everybody's contribution to our journals is important to me and if anybody ever feels that they do not receive the recognition they deserve then please let me know. I am after all elected to serve you, the members.
