[Sussex] Does anyone know when/if the next issue of LinuxFormatis due out?

[Geoffrey Teale]

Taking up those headlines in the effort to save people from the ffort of 
reading Linux Format...

John D. wrote:
----%<------

> With sides of Gimp 2.2, 

Ah the GIMP.. an old favourite.  Use it, it's cool :-)

> Emacs for beginners, 

*Yay*  Well worth reading I suggest.  The application I use more than 
any other on Linux.

> Basic for linux (i.e. that 
> VB  and "Gambas"), 

The fact that BASIC has a place in modern business at all is completely 
the work of the evil empire's famous leader having an obvious bias 
towards this abortion of a language (remember Altair BASIC is the only 
software Billy G actually wrote for Microsoft (or Micro-soft as it was 
back then)).

Many of us learned BASIC in the eightes because it was the 3GL available 
on our simple 8bit machines (in many cases it was the entire UI) - we 
don't have those restrictions any more and we seriously don't need to 
compromise the quality of our development with pointless syntactic sugar 
and inept structures.

Seriously, If you can avoid it don't use BASIC on Linux unless you have 
to - there are much better options (Python, Ruby, Bash.. goddamn it even 
Perl).

That said I'd also point out that OpenOffice comes with a rather 
interesting BASIC implementation built in and contrary to popular belief 
it has a very useable form designer and access style database front end 
hidden in their as well.

Those features will be much more apparant to people when they see 
OpenOffice.org 2 in the next couple of months (BTW, if you're running 
Ubuntu's Hoary Hedgehog pre-release you can just apt-get install 
OpenOffice.org2 to see it's current state).  Another major advantage of 
the 2.0 stream is that StarBASIC is also complimented by the option of 
internal scripting in Python - a much better option.

> Guido Van Rossum and Python, 

Speak of the devil!

Python is by no means perfect, but compared to BASIC.... *sheeesh*

> War On Window - Is the 
> Nato  Nuclear Deterrent safe funning on Windows? 

Seriously, I think it really depends on the engineers working on the 
project and the context in which it is used.  I imagine the environment 
in which Windows is running is much less complex than you're average 
desktop or on-line server.

-- 
Geoff Teale
Free Software Foundation <tealeg at member.fsf.org>