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RIP: The Perl Journal

Posted by chrisd on from the tpj-was-good-for-perl dept.

mbadolato writes "I'm surprised this hasn't been reported yet. Over at use.perl they're reporting that when the current issue of SysAdmin comes out, this will be the last installment of The Perl Journal. It's a shame. TPJ originally was stopped as a stand-alone, but was then included into Sysadmin. Now that's going too. We all owe a big thanks to all the contributers, and to Jon Orwant, for providing us a great resource in TPJ over the years."

5 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. Sad News by jamieo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This is really sad. I've subscribed to TPJ since about issue 3 and have all the issues. The SysAdmin deal was welcome, but only to keep it alive.

    TPJ was such a valuable resource for me as a perl hacker. You learned so much from each issue and people always contributed interesting articles.

    Seems like my 2 year subscription will now be for SysAdmin - something that I'm not really interested in :(

  2. Re:Request it back to the community? by jukal · · Score: 5, Interesting
    this comp.lang.perl.misc posting by Jon Orwant who started the magazine together with Tom Christiansen in 1996, gives some insight how the dilemma started. This is just a short clip:

    "there's no shortage of content out there, and the magazine could easily go bimonthly and then monthly -- indeed, when EarthWeb acquired TPJ I had thought that was the plan.".

    Apparently, TPJ was just in wrong place at wrong time, and fall to a vacuum because of that.

  3. IOPCC? by GMontag451 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So does this mean that the IOPCC (International Obfuscated Perl Code Contest) is defunct? Reading the winners from that and trying to figure out what they do was something I always looked forward to each year.

    1. Re:IOPCC? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Do you think that Chinese is obfuscated because you can't read it? (assuming you don't know chinese...)

      Of course it isn't. Neither is perl - if you learn perl, it's actually quite clear. Just like if you learn korean, it'll be quite clear.

      Why do people assume programming languages should be readable with no effort? The most expressive languages once you have learned them are not always the up-front clearest. C*, Lisp, APL, Forth, Perl are NOT reknowned for their legibility for complete beginners, but would you want to write an OS [C], an AI application [Lisp], a financial analysis package [APL], a spacecraft's embedded systems [Forth], or a genetic analysis program [Perl] in Visual Basic (yuck!)

      * C takes quite some learning - it's just usually one of the first people learn.

    2. Re:IOPCC? by OrangeTrafficCone · · Score: 2, Interesting
      As the most recent Best of Show (2000) recipient, I am very saddened to hear of TPJ's demise: it robs me of defending my title with this sort of stuff:

      $;=q(,225:332.711,242.913,233:543:253:357:777,233: 626;422:345);
      $,=length($0.$^T);$:=join"",map{chr(hex("2$_"))}sp lit(//,"dbfa");
      for(unpack("A4"x++$,,$;)){eval"y|.:;,|$:|";($,,@,) =split(//,$_);
      print chr(ord('`')+eval join($,,@,));}print"\n";

      This contest gave me an outlet to keep my production code from complete incomprehensibility.
      I have been cooking up entries for over a year now, waiting to hear the opening bell for the next contest, which it appears will now not ring.

      P.S.: if anyone wants to see Yahtzee implemented in less than 1k, drop me a mail.