Dr. Dobb's 38-Year Run Comes To an End

An anonymous reader writes: Dr. Dobb's — long time icon of programming magazines — "sunsets" at the end of the year. Editor Andrew Binstock says despite growing traffic numbers, the decline in revenue from ads means there will be no new content posted after 2014 ends. (The site will stay up for at least a year, hopefully longer.) Younger people may not care, but for the hard core old guys, it marks the end of a world where broad knowledge of computers and being willing to create solutions instead of reuse them was valuable. Binstock might disagree; he said, "As our page views show, the need for an independent site with in-depth articles, code, algorithms, and reliable product reviews is still very much present. And I will dearly miss that content. I wish I could point you to another site that does similar work, but alas, I know of none."

Comments

Pretty sad

[mingot]

Loved it growing up. I learned a lot from the al stevens run of articles where he built a terminal program.

Re:Pretty sad

[Dutch Gun]

I was a subscriber back in the day. Sad to see it going, but it's not too surprising, given modern trends.

I have to admit, though, the content was a bit on the broad side to be really useful to me, since my focus was mostly on client-side application programming in C++ (I wanted to become a videogame programmer). I was still a student then, so about 90% of the content flew right over my head. As such, I found the C/C++ User's Journal more relevant. Even so, I enjoyed reading it and trying to figure out what they were talking about. Eventually, only about 75% went over my head, so I think I learned a few things, although I still couldn't write a database query to save my life.

Re:Pretty sad

[Austerity Empowers]

That's kind of the problem and why I dropped subscription a while back. The explosion of computing and computing jobs means that their target audience is wildly diverse and I found maybe one article in a year would touch on a subject or topic that was remotely applicable to me, and it wasn't paying out.

Re: Pretty sad

[bill_mcgonigle]

hrm, for me it was the wildly obscure articles that I thought expanded my horizons the most. I had other subscriptions (e.g. WebTechniques, JDJ) for narrow-focus learning.

Re:Pretty sad

[Dutch Gun]

Or the modern trend of obsolescence of old media formats.

The simple fact of the matter is that Dr. Dobbs and similar magazines really aren't as relevant in the modern world, and that's why they're being mothballed. They've been replaced by a number of things. Online technical resources are increasingly abundant, and are often more than sufficient to learn about any topic you desire. Nearly every question I have as a professional programmer has likely already been asked and answered, often in considerable detail, on sites such as stack overflow. Various how-to topics are explored on both personal and professional blogs or other programmer-focused sites, and everything is nicely indexed and immediately accessible through the magic of Google search.

The simple fact that Google rarely points to Dr Dobbs' site about things I search for (maybe your searches are different) tends to highlight its increasing irrelevance. As much as I enjoyed reading it a few decades ago, it's time to move on. The world has changed, and some things inevitably get left behind.

It is an end of a era...

[ndykman]

Can't think of any one source that had the breadth and depth of Dr. Dobb's. Always look forward to when it came in the mail back in the day, because I knew that I'd always would learn something.

Seriously, I hope they can find funding or start a project to ensure their archive exists and is available to all. It'd be a unique contribution to computing history.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Time to mourn another passing...

[Anonymous Coward]

First the print magazines died, and now even the websites are dying. They said they had over 10 million page views last year. If only there was a simple, unhackable micro-payment system that could have delivered them 2 cents a page view they would have plenty of money for the content and delivery. Google should have delivered this years ago because they already have all the google stats on every page. You would just have to depost $10 or $20 to your account, then each click would show the cost and balance remaining. It could work on almost all websites. I guess everyone is waiting for Apple to come up with a solution. But their solution would end up being $1 per page view with 20 cents going to Apple. Just like their overpriced movies.

Hardly (and sadly) not a unique tale

[Anonymous Coward]

There were some truly excellent magazines way back in the 70's and 80's. We had BYTE to set the standard, with excellent publications like Dr Dobbs, Computer Language, and even Nibble.

As the PC arose, however, magazine after magazine seems to have been taken over by jerks at places like CMP who drained them of all their meaty technical content, flushed all non-PC-compatible content, and in some cases tried to convert them into industry rags. Younger computer users do not have that same joy of getting a monthly magazine with articles loaded with code and/or schematics and parts lists or (in the case of computer language) coverage of some new computer language that has some interesting featrures and might be just the right fit for some new project. The publications are sadly a case study in how hired-gun "interchangeable" CEOs with too many MBAs and no common sense or technical backgrounds can ruin a good institution. One would have thought the spectacular lessons of Scully at Apple (or Fiorina at HP) would have put an end to such screwups acress the entire computer industry...

Dr Dobb's Journal of Computing Calisthenics and orthodontia running light without overbyte was among the very best, and you just cannot precisely reproduce that (or a half-inch thick issue of BYTE (from before about 1985)) with a web page...

Former subscriber

[jgotts]

I was a subscriber for a few years but I found their content to be too Windows-centric so I quit.

It's sad to see them go but as a full-time programmer I haven't cracked a single book or magazine related to programming in over a year. My extensive library collects extensive dust.

Re:Offline archive?

[OrangeTide]

I ordered the current DVD up to 2009, so I have at least some of the articles. I still occasionally go back to old articles because a lot of the software I do hasn't changed much in decades. (Unix and embedded)

Several years ago I ordered the CD collection of Small C articles, and found it pretty useful for grasping the essentials of compiler design. Even if the information is decades old, it was still relevant for the fundamentals of how C compiling and linking works. (at least on Unix/Linux, which is based on decades old designs)