writing

Established in 1998, Templeman Consulting is run by Julian and Jane Templeman, and we're based in London and North Wales. Julian does all the technical stuff, while Jane handles the business side of the company, and also does graphical design and illustration.

Here's Julian's informal bio. You can get a formal CV by emailing us....

Julian first touched fingers to keypunch in 1972, punching Fortran code onto cards at Imperial College in London (England, that is) and soon moved onto Macro-11 programming on PDP-11s. This qualifies him as a real programmer, and he still sticks to the real programmer's motto ("A real programmer can write Fortran in any language") whenever he can.Until recently, he even had a PDP-11 in his garage, to remind him of better times.

He learnt Fortran while becoming a geologist at Imperial College, but he has never practised in the rock business, as he succumbed to the charms of graphics programming during the course of doing his PhD in Igneous Geochemistry (which is nearly as interesting as it sounds). Abandoning geology at that point, he headed off into computing, and is so properly titled 'B.Sc (Hons), Ph.D. (Almost)'.

In the late 80's, however, he's succumbed to the universal drift towards quiche-eating, and now finds himself programming in C++ and even Java, a language so quiche-like that it eschews pointers, afraid to give direct access to memory, figuring that this is too dangerous. As a result, he got involved in Microsoft's ActiveX and COM ventures, realising that these are the nearest a real programmer is going to get to real programming nowadays, with all the acronyms, pointers, arcane system calls, and opportunities for general mayhem that anyone could want. Oh yes, and there are paying customers out there who need this stuff, too...

Now there's .NET and C#, Microsoft's new language and supposed Java killer. Will it dethrone Java? No-one knows for now, but it's a neat language name (even if you can't look for it on most search engines!). But wait! Fujitsu is doing a port of Fortran to .NET... now, *that's* more like it. COM programming in Fortran, anyone? The other neat thing about .NET is that Visual Basic is now a proper OO programming language. Whatever next?

In between times he's programmed systems of all types and sizes, from single-chip computers for instrumentation, up to Cray and CDC supercomputers. In the course of these endeavours, he has (he is confident to assert) forgotten more programming languages than most of the readers of this page will ever learn… Snobol, Spitbol, Babbage, Forth, Trac, flavours of Lisp, flavours of Basic (the A$ sort…), several dialects of JCL (//DD SYSIN * and all that jazz), Teco, Macro11, Z80 assembler, various other assembers, Icon... the list is, if not endless, then at least reasonably long. Being a real programmer, he has (of course) never programmed in Cobol, RPG or any other of those languages beloved by suits and bean-counters, or done anything serious involving SQL :-) Although, sadly, an increasing amount of database-related material is creeping in, and he's finding he is having to relax his standards somewhat.

In order to pay the bills, he is currently running a training and consultancy company along with his wife, and is mainly involved in Windows programming, C++, Java, COM/ActiveX and .NET.

A second career in writing has also beckoned, and he has written books for Wrox Press, Coriolis and Microsoft Press; his articles in programming journals are also fairly regular, if not frequent.

In such spare time as he has, he follows numerous pursuits, chief among which are playing a variety of instruments (acoustic guitar, bass, mandolin and mandola), listening to music, cooking (especially bread-making), ignoring DIY and refusing to maintain cars.