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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."
Loved it growing up. I learned a lot from the al stevens run of articles where he built a terminal program.
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.
Anyone know if there's going to be an offline archive?
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.
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...
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.
Back in my day, we had to read books and articles to understand some of the current trends. You had to get some serious depth.
These days, a lot of it is google leading to stack overflow for a quick pattern match of a fix.
But at least it means the good (those with real understanding and real depth) will look different than those that build a career out of quick-n-dirty stack overflow searches.
Note that I find stack overflow an amazing resource, however, when I ask current gen "unix-heads" how to do something and they google for a stack-overflow page vs doing "man bash" means the associated concepts were completely missed.
Back in the day Dr Dobbs, Byte, Embedded Systems Journal, and Computer Languages were the 4 I read every month.
those don't pay steady salaries
Sunset Dr. Dobbs
Ye nattering nabobs
Who'd prefer cleanshaven
Java refactoring jobs
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
When nearly all of your readers block ads, it's tough to make it as an ad-supported site.
(Yes, I have AdBlockPlus installed, too.)
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
From the article: ... ...
Despite our excellent growth on the editorial side, our revenue declined such that today it's barely 30% of what it was when I started. While some of this drop is undoubtedly due to turnover in our sales staff, even if the staff had been stable and executed perfectly, revenue would be much the same and future prospects would surely point to upcoming losses. This is because in the last 18 months, there has been a marked shift in how vendors value website advertising. They've come to realize that website ads tend to be less effective than they once were. Given that I've never bought a single item by clicking on an ad on a website, this conclusion seems correct in the small.
Makes you wonder how other websites that depend on ad revenue are surviving.
seems to be the pattern of media in general these days...
Deep articles are going the way of the dodo. Not enough ad impressions etc on those as they appeal to a narrow audience.
Shallow product "reviews" and flame baiting on the other hand...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
I don't see why Amazon could not do micropayments. One could access content via Amazon's web site, they could lend you, say, $5 when you enroll and when your usage adds up to $5 they bill your payment card, and they bill your payment card anyway at the end of the year. If you become a bad debt they pass the risk on to their content providers. Amazon takes a cut of the micropayment on each transaction.
Nullius in verba
"I wish I could point you to another site that does similar work, but alas, I know of none."
You mean you haven't read Bennett's high-quality journalism?
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
From a C++ perspective, the only lately useful articles are from Andrew Koenig, but how the release of the articles is done has pissed me off so much I removed it from my feeds. His most recent article series, is at part 9: Abstractions for Binary Search. How about write an article that can be released in a single piece and consumed as such. Trying to consume parts of something every few weeks is an ineffective learning tool. There doesn't seem to be any more single articles. The interesting ones are broken up into multiple parts released every week or two. FUCK THAT. Give me an article that I can read, start to finish. Don't make me come back next week. I'm a developer. I'm already being torn six ways to sundown by various issues, I don't need a publication compounding that. Give me single, solitary articles that have all the content in a single page and I'm happy (it also makes the googling easier).
I rarely max out my AMD quad-core processor and/or 4GB memory. I don't have any software that can smoother the hardware.
Bwahahahaha!
Sincerely,
A professional videogame programmer
---
Kidding aside... For most types of applications on the desktop (e.g. business apps that spend most of their time querying a remote database), you can get away with suboptimal code, because programmer efficiency and maintainable code is more important than code efficiency. That's not necessarily a sign of shoddy engineering, although poorly optimized code for no good reason certainly might be. Over-optimizing code where you don't need it can also be highly problematic as well. Even as a C++ programmer, I still prefer to write my game tools in C# whenever possible.
That being said, there are still plenty of specialized applications that demand top performance. Videogames, scientific computing, highly scalable server applications (efficiency = cost savings), and so on. We're also scaling down our computers as well, where you don't have the crazy power you have on the desktop. Examples include smart phones and even smart watches, where run-time efficiency translates directly to improved battery life.
So, sometimes efficiency matters a great deal, and sometimes it doesn't. A good programmer knows when each is appropriate and their tradeoffs, and uses the correct tools for the job at hand.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
The problem is that the costs outweigh the revenue. Reducing costs in a way that also reduces revenue is probably not a good solution.
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