The Perl Journal Bought by CMP

pudge (Slashcode wrangler, MacPerl maintainer, and use.perl editor) wrote in to tell us that The Perl Journal has been bought by CMP. This of course ends the ongoing struggles with Earthweb that has resulted in many subscribers (including me) going without what is one of the best technical journals being published today. CMP of course publishes several other good journals including Dr. Dobbs. Besides Jon Orwant (who will continue as Senior Contributing Editor) nobody is happier to see TPJ return then me!

Comments

Byte

[Midnight Thunder]

Weren't CMP the guys who bought Byte, killed the paper edition and then put up the web only edition (does anybody ever visit it?), simply because they felt it covered a market that was already covered by some of their other paper magazines, even though it was unique in its class?

Then.

[RPoet]

"Besides Jon Orwant (who will continue as Senior Contributing Editor) nobody is happier to see TPJ return then me!"

Really, you've got some extreme self confidence there taco, if you think people are so happy to see TPJ return, and then see you.

--

Best part about CMP

[Snowfox]

The best part about any CMP publication is that you can receive the publication for free, so long as you're willing to fill out a lengthy form once a year and receive a bunch of relevant junk mail. (Although I strongly advise that you not put your correct office phone/fax on the form.)

Re:Best part about CMP

[Nurgster]

I found most of their publications are almost impossible to obtain outside the US, and they definately don't give them away to non-US people (except at trade shows).

What I'd do to be able to pop down my local shop any buy Dr Dobbs or even better, Game Developer Magazine...

Assembly?

[wiredog]

Kids these days... In my day we coded in machine language! Raw hexadecimal bytes!

Uphill, both ways, in the snow.

And we liked it, too.

Re:All that and a free subscription to SysAdmin

[orwant]

It'll stay a physically separate magazine. What "supplement" means is that it'll be bagged with Sys Admin in the stores, and internally CMP will have one infrastructure for both Sys Admin and TPJ to save on costs.

That's a very good news

[chrysalis]

TPJ is an excellent publication for programmers. Not only for Perl programmers but for all programmers. There are very good algorithms and ideas to solve problems.
TPJ has only 2-3 pages of blah-blah and news of the world. The rest is 100% listings. These are solutions to real-world problems, with always good explanations from the author. It's also an excellent way to discover powerful Perl modules you never heard about before.
The only nasty thing about TPJ is when you live oversea. I live in France, and the paper edition of TPJ always comes to my mailbox 3 months late.
TPJ is that sort of magazine you don't throw away. You keep it, you archive all issues, because they are like an excellent up-to-date reference book.
I'd strongly suggest any programmer to subscribe TPJ. *But* you have to already know Perl to understand everything. TPJ isn't a good magazine for beginners. All articles assume that you already know all Perl basics (and some Perl intrinsics too) .

-- Pure FTP server - Upgrade your FTP server to something simple and secure.

Re:That's a very good news

[Waffle Iron]

TPJ has only 2-3 pages of blah-blah and news of the world. The rest is 100% listings.

This is one of the reasons the TPJ financial difficulties. They had to invest large amounts of money in custom typesetting machines that were outfitted with extra $ and @ characters.

Re:Why Perl Sucks

[Louis_Wu]

[HumorOn]
I agree. That's why I code everything in Assembly (on the 8086 architecture, none of this new stuff). Assembly lets you speed-tune code, and the days I spend making Hello World run .01 seconds faster are well spent in my book.
[/HumorOff]

Perl doesn't Look like English (or German or Swahili), but it Acts like English.

• In English, the words you use change meaning slightly depending upon the context - "I hate tapioca pudding", "I hate the man who killed my parents"; in Perl, the operators change meaning slightly depending upon the context - scalar, list, etc.
• In English you can often get away with omiting grammar which "should" be there, but you must know when your cheating will impair the receiver's ability to understand you - "Wanna go?", "Give it here."; in Perl you can omit much of the grammar which is technically correct - omit the semi-colon in the last line in a loop, omit most parentheses (but you can use them for clarity if you want).

Perl looks like a cross between chicken scratchings and line noise, but that is actually one of it's perverse strengths - it is short and quick to write. Take the substitute operator "s/ / /", where the first space is what you want to replace, and the second space is what you want to replace it with. If that were English it would look more like this, "Substitute( ) With( )", over a four-fold increase in typing for the programer. When coding in a language you know well, the later is frustrating and slow, while the former is short and unobtrusive.

Mr. Wall realized that programmers learn a language, regardless of what the commands look like. So he made a language which is easy to program, quick to program, and syntactically preditable, even if it doesn't have the most natural commands and operators. Programmers learn the language they work with, and after the learning is over, it doesn't matter much whether the operators are "natural language", except that natural language operators are longer than those in Perl, and therefore take more effort to use.

Perl trys to get out of the way and let you do your work.

Louis Wu

"Never, ever, EVER trust a telepath. I'm going to have that tattooed on my eyelids."

Unobfuscated Perl Contest

[Art_XIV]

How 'bout if TPJ sponsors an Unobfuscated Perl contest?

I'm serious, here. It's not very diffucult to make Perl code thats hard to understand, but it's a bit harder to make Perl code thats absolutely clear.

So how about an Unobfuscated Perl contest where the participants are rewarded for making the most difficult/obscure process the most clear? In 250 lines or less.