back to article Dr. Dobb's Journal sails into the sunset - yet again

Programming journal and website Dr. Dobb's is ceasing publication of new content at the end of 2014. Editor Andrew Binstock explains the decision by owners United Business Media to "sunset" the site, though all existing content will remain available. Dr. Dobb’s Journal began as a newsletter published by Bob Albrecht and …

  1. Irongut

    They were still going?

    I could have sworn they stopped publishing new content about 3 years ago.

    There is definitely a gap in the market for a decent site / mag for programmers. All the ones I read in the 90s and early 00s have died in the last 10 years. Ideally it should be language agnostic and cover older tech as well as the bleeding edge.

    1. AbelSoul
      Thumb Up

      Re: gap in the market for a decent site / mag for programmers

      I agree. I've often thought that Stackoverflow could possibly support a sibling, magazine-style site.

      The SO site already has a huge userbase and an established, household (well, programming-household) name that could lend weight to such an endeavour.

      1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Re: gap in the market for a decent site / mag for programmers

        The best print publication I know of these days serving a roughly similar function is Communications of the ACM, and that's not really very close, though it does include a mix of (these days) pretty good stuff on programming as a practice, and more-technical pieces in the research section. It's nice to have something that's not all hard-core CS research but isn't afraid to print the math.

        And CACM focuses on stuff with immediate real-world relevancy (at least for some organizations); I was reading the September 2014 issue the other day, and they had a nice article on unexpected failure modes for clustered systems under network partitions. (The moral of that piece: a lot of network-gear vendors seem to have pretty serious bugs in their firmware.)

        But DDJ it ain't. The companion magazine ACM Queue was more DDJ-like, but it went all-online a while back, and now somehow I never get around to reading it. I can sit down with a paper journal and focus, but sustained reading on the computer seems tougher, and I need some other incentive (like "I need to read this for work") to commit to it.

    2. LucreLout
      Joke

      Re: They were still going?

      Have you not heard of MSDN Magazine then?

      There --->

      The joke icon is over there!!! -->>

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: They were still going?

      gamedev.net is the closest one I'm aware of, within a certain niche anyway. It's been around ~15 years, is independent AFAICT, and has a healthy user base. Looks like it'll be around for awhile if they can successfully make the transition from ad-funded to subscriber-funded.

  2. Wiltshire

    Ah the nostalgia!

    It reminds me of when that and Byte magazine used to be doorstep-thumping great fat editions, and we accessed BIX via dialup modems. Was it Telix software?

    1. Conrad Longmore

      Re: Ah the nostalgia!

      I miss Byte. And PCW.. that didn't even get the chance to say "goodbye".

      1. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

        Re: Ah the nostalgia!

        Happy days. When buying a PC online meant reading through 500 pages of adverts in PCW - then faxing / phoning an order through. My first PC was an Ambra - which was IBMs attempt to have a cheap consumer PC brand while still selling more expensive machines to businesses. 386SX at 25mhz, with 2MB of RAM and a 40MB hard drive. Ah nostalgia. I found my copy of Elite the other day, wonder if I could run it in DOSbox? If I still have a floppy drive somewhere?

        1. wolfetone Silver badge

          Re: Ah the nostalgia!

          The only magazine I used to buy when I first got in to PC's was "Computer Shopper". It's still going now, but I remember they used to be great big thick things with free floppy disks on the front. I remember I got Caldera 95, which made WIndows 3.1 look like Windows 95. *sigh* memories.

          1. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

            Re: Ah the nostalgia!

            I think I preferred PCW. But when I bought my first PC, I had one of each. My brother and I sat in his room for a whole evening going through all 600 pages of ads (one magazine each), finding the likely ones, then compared notes at the end for the cheapest.

            I seem to remember there was about 100 pages of content, and variable many hundred pages of ads. Plus the ones that had little postcards or discs stuck to their ad page, so the magazine would fall open to theirs first. You used to have to shake out all the leaflets, and remove those stuck in bits, before you could read it easily. And people say banner ads on websites are annoying...

            P.S. - we need a nostalgia icon. Perhaps a pile of punch cards sat next to a cup of Ovaltine and a packet of Spangles?

        2. Roland6 Silver badge
          Joke

          Re: Ah the nostalgia!

          >If I still have a floppy drive somewhere?

          Not sure if Windows 8 (or even a current Linux distro) would recognise a 5.25-inch floppy drive...

    2. Jonathan Richards 1

      Re: Ah the nostalgia!

      I read every issue up to 1986 (because I had access to a library, and I could!) and it was even then a unique item. There were other titles in the market: Byte, Creative Computing et al. but Dr Dobb's was always the most thought-provoking and, by me, eagerly awaited.

  3. MacroRodent

    Went downhill even earlier

    I used to subcribe to it in the 1990's, but stopped because at some point too much of the magazine started to be full off tips and tricks specific to Windows programmers, and I just didn't care to read about the finer points of OLE automation. Older Dr.Dobbs tended to be useful for programmers on all platforms. Besides it was no longer tongue in cheek, hacker style had changed into white shirt and tie...

    1. HPCJohn

      Re: Went downhill even earlier

      I still have a whole lot of Byte Magazine.

      Would give it to a library if I thought any would want them!

      No Dr Dobbs though.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Went downhill even earlier

      hear hear .....

      I wish some of our more senior staff had stopped reading at the same time

      Dr Dobbs is responsible for one of our biggest bad business decisions, where we chose to embark on a technology that wa shyped (and advertised) in Dr Dobbs, and has been nothing but pain and frustration since

      (and Im not just talking about C# )

      Anon for obvious reason

    3. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      Re: Went downhill even earlier

      Certainly the last few years of the print publication saw a lot more Windows-related stories, and a lot more software-development (as opposed to programming) stories - things like CMMI discussions and Ambler's agile-dev column (which I have to confess I rarely found valuable, even as my employer was shifting to agile development).

      But I found something worthwhile in every issue. There was Herb Sutter's column on concurrency, for example, every one of which should be mandatory reading for any programmer dealing with multiple threads. The February 2008 issue had a good piece on static checking of C++ code. March 2007 (I'm just picking some at random) had articles on format-string vulnerabilities, Makefile debugging, C++ exception handling, and web map APIs.

      DDJ was the first place I read about things like the BWT or predictive coding or star coding; about aspect-oriented programming; about EFI firmware. It's where I read clever, useful pieces on things like writing custom STL allocators and doing function-point comparisons of program binaries. I'm not sorry I subscribed right up to the end of the print run.

  4. Michael Shelby

    Too Bad

    Being able to read about how to use new C++11 features directly from people like from Koenig and Sutter was a great learning experience for me. I hope the archive stays available online...

  5. Pirate Dave Silver badge
    Pirate

    "the last print edition was dated February 2009."

    Oh, that explains why it stopped showing up here at the office. I just checked, and yep, that's the last one I have on the shelf. Main story was "Computing in the Clouds". And a pic of some dude named Stephen Beal. The Feb 2009 issue was really, really thin - only goes up to page 48. I've seen thicker sales brochures from Walmart...

    Sad, as DDJ used to be fun to read.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Better days

    Once upone a time, my monthly read was DDJ, PL, PJ, and Unix Review. All good reads with much taught (before some degenerated into the latest MS junk).

  7. Version 1.0 Silver badge

    I'm old ...

    ... because I remember keying in Tiny Basic from the listing and getting it running ... in hex via the keypad. Dr. Dobbs was a fine magazine in its heyday ... that would be the first couple of years. I dropped my subscription when they started programming all that GUI shite.

  8. Sporkinum

    Back in the 80's

    Used to read Dobbs, Byte, and Computer Shopper back in the mid-80's. I remember the first Shoppers I got were printed on yellow newsprint and had non glossy covers.

  9. John Gamble

    Goodbye, DDJ

    Behind me, as I type, are a couple of decades worth of DDJ, stored away in protective containers. In them are articles on the Small-C compiler, Cortesi's columns (in particular the one excoriating an over-priced book telling us how to get past 1999 safely -- he summarized the solution in one paragraph), the introduction of 386 BSD, and the name-and-shame of the guy who was holding up the ANSI C standard.

    But as noted above, Windows articles became the majority subject, source code became harder to list, and one columnist... how should I put this ... became more interested in proselytizing than in informing. I'd have to dig to check, but I don't believe I own a 2000-era issue.

    Farewell, DDJ.

  10. Androgynous Cupboard Silver badge

    DDJ was a gem

    I remember reading it as a kid in the 80s, including Verity Stob of course - and well done to El Reg for offering him/her an outlet for his/her fevered ramblings. Even ordered my Dad a CD with 20 years of back-issues a few years ago, flicking through that was like a trip down memory lane.

    It's a shame it's going, the content was always good even if the delivery method was always archaic.

  11. Florida1920
    Facepalm

    It's all about the Benjamins

    Why should we tie up resources starting a series of niche events that are unlikely to grow much, when we could put all that time, effort, and management attention into the bigger tradeshows and move the revenue up more quickly?

    Sowing seeds for the future? Oh, sorry, I forgot. This is modern capitalism. We live only for today.

  12. John Styles

    We want more Stob

    I subscribed for a couple of years at one point. The humour had gone by then. I miss .EXE more tbh.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I still have two shelves worth of Dr, Dobbs issues

    At the time, Dr Dobbs was the only source of in-depth articles on a wide variety of topics. The other mags available around here were too topic specific (PC or games, mostly) and not anywhere close in technical depth.

    I fondly remember the assembly wizardty genius that transpired from Michael Abrash contributions, Al Stevens pragmatism with his C column, and Dick Pountain down to earth approach to problems and new technologies. Dr Dobbs helped me cross the gap from hobbyst to someone capable of creating bigger (not necessarily better) things with some resemblance to what a professional could do. Plus, the FreeBSD series provided fascinating insight into the birth of a quite influential portion of the OS landscape.

    My feeling is that Dr Dobbs represents an era when a single guy, or a couple of them, could create on their own something that meant a significant change for the industry or people in general. Or at least dream about it. And in fact it happened, A couple of guys here and there and we had Linux, Google, MySpace, Facebook and all that. It seems impossible today.

    I have a shelf full of old Byte issues also just in case you want another dose of nostalgia.

    Thank you, Dr. Dobbs, you'll be remembered.

  14. BobSee

    Running Light Without Overbyte

    That Dr. Dobb's tag line was a big part of what nudged me toward 35 years of embedded real-time programming and systems design. Baked into the core of Dr. Dobb's ethos was the notion of doing as much as possible with as little as possible.

    Thanks, Dr. Dobb's!

  15. SF

    See you soon, Dr. Dobbs. I will be waiting for the memorable day when you come back online with a great new issue..

  16. Mark 85

    It should have been required reading.

    In some fanciful, wistful moments, I with this magazine had been required reading for anyone wanting to be a coder or programmer and particularly the Windows programmers. It might have weeded out the "yes, I can program in all languages" clowns. I'm thinking here mostly of those from certain areas of the world where programming is taught but not good, clean, elegant programming.

    Sorry, I'm tired of seeing bug-ridden, cobbled together code by a people who bill for big bucks and deliver crap.

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    We need a better way of paying the costs of these sites.

    That a popular and useful site goes titsup because there is not enough advertising revenue to support it is a testament to how bad things are in the western world. That important resources are funded on the whim of advertising is a crime in this century. We all know that the subscription model just doesn't work.

    There has to be a better way.

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