Today comes the shitty news that Dr. Dobb's (...Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia) is shutting down.
I would not have had the career I have had without DDJ: first as an inspiration, then as a competitor, and then as the last torch of technically rigorous, personally-voiced but professionally edited high-quality programming articles.
DDJ was the last of the great programming magazines and was, probably, the greatest. Only Byte could, perhaps, have an equal claim to the crown. All the rest of ours, an entire industry, envied their columnists, technical editors, and authors. Even the standouts (Microcornucopia, Programmer's Journal, C/C++ Programmer's Journal, Unix Review, PC Techniques, WinTech Journal, and, ... hell, it's my feed... Computer Language, Software Development, and Game Developer) could only occasionally match their quality.
Perhaps what I admired most about Dobb's was that it never wavered from being a programming magazine. In the early 90s, I decreed that Computer Language would never again refer to our profession as "programming," it would only be referred to as "software development." We published articles about management, about architecture and design, we boasted (boasted) of how little source code we published (because we talked about "the real issues"). And while I think there was a valid point to be made, the truth is that programming -- the infinitely challenging alchemy of turning sparks traveling through blocks of sand into computation and information -- is what drew me to the profession, why I will code when I retire, and why I would have a computer under the floorboards if programming were illegal. Dr. Dobb's understood, and celebrated, that mysterious joy. Perhaps that is why it out-lasted all the rest.
Now, it seems like, if our industry has a face, it's the face of an arrogant Silicon Valley douchebag who knows everything about monetization, socialization, and micro-localization and nothing about algorithms, memory models, and programming languages. Dr. Dobb's wasn't a magazine for venture capitalists or "Digital Prophet"s or "Brand-Story Architect"s. It was a magazine for hard-core coders, people who could appreciate the trade-offs in the design of a macro preprocessor, get an "ah-hah!" moment from reading an assembly language listing for a chip they didn't know, or grasp the theme of an implementation discussed over a year of columns.
It will be missed.