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Farewell, Dr. Dobbs

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MilesAhead:
Dr.Dobbs was an amazing programmer's magazine in its prime - at the top of its class.
-mouser (December 16, 2014, 06:55 PM)
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They were numero uno afa programming magazines.  I published a few articles for R&D Publications back in the day.  They had C/C++ Users Journal and a few others.  Dr. Dobb's parent company bought them out and posted most of the articles and source code including stuff from the C Users Group.  The DDJ archives are the only location where I found a couple of my works.  For selfish reasons I'm glad they intend to keep the current content online.

It brings back memories of the good old days when I was making good money doing work I loved.  I'll miss DDJ.  It seems the Programming Paradigm is about to shift to dumbed down phone apps.  :)

If anyone is curious this is the last article I wrote for publication.  It appeared in the August 1994 issue of C/C++ Users Journal.

I guess surviving means you keep losing those things you enjoyed along the way.

40hz:
I guess surviving means you keep losing those things you enjoyed along the way.
-MilesAhead (December 17, 2014, 05:59 AM)
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+1

In an era of technology where the desire to be considered "cool" has almost entirely replaced the desire to be considered "elegant," it's understandable. Brightly colored cookie cutter apps, running on locked-down dumb-downed devices, for a dumbed-down and uncaring public. That's where we seem to be going these days. People will even camp out on the sidewalk for days just to be among the first to buy in.

Such a high price we pay for "Cool!" :-\

IainB:
I had never heard of this periodical before now.

If anyone is curious this is the last article I wrote for publication.  It appeared in the August 1994 issue of C/C++ Users Journal.
-MilesAhead (December 17, 2014, 05:59 AM)
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Thanks, interesting article by Michael Kelly. Oddly enough, I was thinking earlier this week that I felt sure that - from a user's perspective - multithreading seemed to work better under OS2 than it seems to work under Win8.1, but I have no factual performance basis for comparison to verify that. Maybe there's just a whole lot more (load) in the Win8.1 OS. Would be interesting to know whether and how far we have improved. I recollect a friend of mine saying that IBM mainframes seemed to have to grow proportionately so as to be able to run the increasingly bloated OSes...

...In an era of technology where the desire to be considered "cool" has almost entirely replaced the desire to be considered "elegant," it's understandable. ...
-40hz (December 17, 2014, 06:27 AM)
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Well, yes, and underlying that it was the coding that could be considered "elegant" (or not) - if that's what you meant - and elegant coding usually proved to be efficient too. However, I suspect that, on examination, a lot of modern-day coding could probably be seen to be elegant/efficient, if only because of its often having to make best use of what might be potentially limited resources - e.g., (say) on different devices' CPUs.

MilesAhead:
Oddly enough, I was thinking earlier this week that I felt sure that - from a user's perspective - multithreading seemed to work better under OS2 than it seems to work under Win8.1, but I have no factual performance
-IainB (December 17, 2014, 04:06 PM)
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When I saw Borland release that C++ compiler for OS/2 I thought the OS would reach critical mass.  I think much of the problem was IBM did not sell computers with it preloaded.  Also CDROM was a new thing.  Most PCs were sold with a HD and a 3 1/2" floppy drive.  Inserting 15+ diskettes to install OS/2 was quite a chore.  I shelled out about $500 to add a Toshiba 2x SCSI CDROM to my 486(the cost of a bare drive with SCSI cable from Computer Shopper if you can believe that.)  At that time 2x was as fast as there was.  Only 2 CDROM makers made a 2x drive for PCs.  It seems incredible now.  :)

OS/2 had full 32 bit multitasking and very good Dos emulation when Windows was still on 3.x.  I remember when OS/2 2.1 was released most of the stability bugs were fixed.  I bought that one on CD.  It worked quite well on my slow but sure ISA bus 486.  :)

As for the code in the article, it was extremely easy to get working as the Queue routines were in the OS API.

peter.s:
"Ah, Dr. Dobb's. While I - as a German - never actually got my hands on even one of those magazines, I surely know its reputation. A tragic loss for everyone."

Many U.S. publications are either not available on the Continent, or then, at outrageous(ly inflated) prices only, 5 times the U.S. price is quite common. So many of these publications have to rely on their "native" readers only, i.e. for 300 U.S. readers, there is perhaps Continental reader, and as I said in a previous post, these last years, there is an additional problem by Universities' tendency to not buy paper publications anymore whenever possible, but to "make available" expensive publications by electronic means only, which means, for everybody really interested but not belongig to the university anymore, that there will be awful reading on screen at best, most of the time without copying even of short citations, and without any printing-out, which means you will only read what's absolutely necessary to your immediate, current work, at best, and not any line else, and even for a student or prof, it makes a big difference if he can browse some paper in his spare time, for leisure, or if he must read on a screen in the university (bad 17" one of their installations, or his own, often tiny, notebook screen, by WAN) - as before, the latter alternative cause exclusive reading of some specifically needed article only, no more browsing of anything else whatsoever. (Time plays another role here, cf. changed univ curriculae by "Bologna": either it's on the list of mandatory readings, or it doesn't exist anymore.)

The outrageously overpriced dollar does not help in any way, so most people on the Continent who traditionally would have been very interested in "enlarging their horizon" are simply cut off of most of possibly horizon-enlarging stuff now, whilst many of those publications are quite readily available for U.S. readers, even if they need to buy them.

Most of these high-brow publications are written in English, but then, we all know most Americans do not have any interest in benefiting from such stuff that would be available though, free or cheap to them, in their native language; whilst it is generally assumed that the Continental (not: power) elites who are eager to read such stuff, and without problems in what's the new lingua franca for, are also eager to first pay 5 times the natural price.* (Oh yes, it's all the intermediates' fault, isn't it? Well, I call this a general, reproachable organizational fault instead.)

Most people in this forum refuse to discuss general ideas; that gives them room to endlessly chat about time and time again new symptoms of denied fundamentals.**

* and ** = Some people have to learn it the hard way. Good riddance to just some other of innumerable examples, and tendency to disappear will accelerate.

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