RIP: The Perl Journal

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."

Comments

The Perl Review

[mir]

The Perl Review is exactly what you describe: a Perl journal, distributed only as PDF at the moment. The publishers hope to get it on paper one day, but they wanted to get it started., so the first 5 issues are already available.

Re:Request it back to the community?

[jukal]

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.

The Perl Journal story .. in Perl!

[wackybrit]

First the money went..

$tpj =~ s/\$//g;

So two magazines merged..

$sysadmin .= $tpj;

The advertising slump hit hard..

$sysadmin =~ s/ActiveState/Make Money Fast!/g;

And eventually they lost money merged together too.

$sysadmin =~ s/\$//g;

The arse totally fell out of the operation.

$sysadmin =~ s/.//g;

So they shut up shop.

exit;

IOPCC?

[GMontag451]

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.

Perhaps...

[ldopa1]

Perhaps the reason that nobody has reported it is that very few people read it in the first place, and as such, very few people care.

This may also be the reason that they aren't going to be continuing with the journal in the first place, don't you think?

I doubt few people lamented the end of the Ultrix journal....

No Real Surprise

[elmegil]

I think part of the problem is that Sysadmin did their best to offend the TPJ subscribers they inherited.

• Content was somewhat redundant, with perl articles in the Sysadmin section as well as the TPJ section.
• Only 3 or so real TPJ articles every other issue (at least it seemed pretty sparse) as opposed to the 8 or more in the old TPJ.
• Most damning, if Sysadmin treated everyone like they did me.... As soon as the two merged I was inundated with snail-mail spam. Eventually I figured out that some code on the address meant it came from Sysadmin, and I called and complained. They told me I could opt out, why was this a problem? At least I got opted out and the flow had slowed way down since then.

I had already renewed my subscription (boy do I regret that doubly now) but wasn't planning on renewing again anyway. Not because TPJ wasn't wanted, but because what I was getting in Sysadmin wasn't really TPJ any more, and Sysadmin itself isn't of any interest or use to me and they abused the relationship.

Re:Periodicals are advertising supported...

[pmz]

It's not about content versus pretty pictures; it's about audience size and how much of that audience is willing to pay for things.

I still agree with the parent post. Most technical print magazines have very little useful content. The only reasons I keep a magazine subscription going is to know what the buzzwords-of-the-month are and to see what the hot-products-of-the-month are. In this respect, the advertisements are actually the content.

Quite honestly, if I were to take the things I see in a magazine seriously, I would have a record number of failed projects that no one else can maintain to claim responsibility for. The fact is, if a magazine publishes something as a bold-faced headline, odds are that technology is so immature or vaporous that it will disappear into obscurity before I even understand what it is. This is true for nearly any technology domain, regardless of which company is backing the brand names and acronyms.

Conclusion: magazines are good for buzzwords and "the bleeding edge", but look elsewhere for things on which one can risk a reputation.

O'Reilly to publish 'best of' anthologies

[jacobito]

In case you haven't heard, O'Reilly will be compiling and publishing three anthologies of the best articles from the Perl Journal:

Games, Diversions, and Perl Culture
Web, Graphics and Perl TK
Computer Science and Perl Programming

If you've never read TPJ before (or even if you have), be sure to grab one of these books when they come out. TPJ set a high standard of quality, with articles that were intelligent, entertaining, and usually a bit quirky.