Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ncar!ames!pacbell!ptsfa!jeg From: jeg@ptsfa.PacBell.COM (John Girard) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Response to Alan Holub's Last Column Message-ID: <4523@ptsfa.PacBell.COM> Date: 29 Sep 88 22:36:50 GMT Organization: Pacific * Bell, San Ramon, CA Lines: 135 > 9/29/88 > > After reading Alan Holub's "last column" that had not been > published, I sent a copy to Jon Erickson and asked him why I > should continue to read DDJ. His reply was quick, and he asked > me to post his view of the situation on the net, for equal > representation. Obviously, there is a conflict between Alan > and Jon. But Jon says he is leaving the door open to readers > to comment, and that he will respond personally. > > Please send any feedback direct to Jon at DDJ. > Over the past few weeks, there's been quite a lot of discussion about Dr. Dobb's Journal, much of it rumor, innuendo, and specu- lation. And, as you might expect, more than a little bit of this has been just plain misinformation. Because of problems such as this, I devoted my Editorial in the September '88 issue of the magazine specifically to the subject of what you can expect with DDJ. A lot of what I'll say here about the sort of things DDJ will be doing is discussed in more depth there. One thing I said there bears repeating: "Believe it not, we are kind of happy to find out that DDJ readers care enough about the magazine to raise a stink when they feel their magazine is being threatened." I'd also like to say that I won't be following up on this thread here on Usenet since I don't want to get into any mud-slinging matches; they just aren't that productive. However, I am glad to talk with any of you who want to drop me a letter or give me a phone call. I can be reached at (415) 366-3600 or be mailed letters to Jon Erickson, Editor-in-Chief, DDJ, 501 Galvenston Dr., Redwood City, CA 94063. If you send me a letter, I'll phone you back. This will be a fairly long message; I apologize for that but it seems that the time is warranted. One last note before launching into a few specifics: the articles and programs in DDJ are primarily reader-submitted. If you would like to see an article on a specific topic, let me know, or better yet, write it and submit it. DDJ is one of the few maga- zines left around that still relies on *reader* submissions and support. If the magazine isn't what you want or need, you can do something about it by submitting an article. 1. The decision to cancel Allen Holub's monthly column was mine. I did so because Allen would not allow us to provide his source listings free of charge (like every other program in the maga- zine) on our CompuServe forum or at cost to readers through our disk distribution service. Instead he wanted to sell the source code through his own software business. I felt his column was becoming, in effect, a free advertisment for his business. When I cancelled the column, I told Allen that I valued his association with the magazine and with the C language and would like to put him under a new contract as a contributing editor to write feature articles and reviews. At first he said that he was in- terested but then apparently declined. 2. The ratio of advertising to editorial pages has been going up in favor of editorial pages since I joined DDJ. I have insisted on that. Our November issue will be greater than 40 percent edi- torial which is average or above average for the industry. In the first part of this year, we were running about 50 pages of edi- torial per issue. For the past few months, this has risen to about 60, and next year we are planning up to 80 pages in some months. Even if an increase in ad pages doesn't happen as expect- ed, we will be increasing the ratio above what it is now. 3. We will continue to publish listings and those listings will continue to be more than just quick examples. In January '89, for instance, we are going to publish a graphics utility that is more than 1200 lines of code. In March/April of next year, we are planning on publishing the source code of an implementation of Scheme. WE WILL ALWAYS PUBLISH CODE AND MAKE IT AVAILABLE TO READERS. We'll occasionally run an article that does not have code (one article in December won't have any), but, for me, a DDJ article means text AND code. And more pages in the magazine means more code. 4. The magazine is not going mass-market, low-tech. DDJ readers want to be challenged, not coddled. We will not spoon-feed you, we expect that you are experienced, advanced programmers who don't need to have a simple concepts explained. 5. The technical staff at DDJ is being expanded. Kent Porter is the senior technical editor who started in July and we are ad- vertising for another technical editor right now. We have expand- ed our list of contributing editors as well. Management has less to do with the editorial content of this magazine than with any magazine I've ever seen. They don't tell us what to publish and in fact seem afraid to bring up the subject. I respect them for that if nothing else. My responsibilty lies with readers, not with advertisers or management. 6. Our columns currently consist of C programming, Structured Programming, and Programming Paradigmns. We may include another next year as our page count continues to increase. 7. As a courtesy to Allen, I offered him the opportunity to write a final column. What he turned in was a scurrilous attack on me and the magazine. He called it his "final editorial." I decided on not publishing it (would you have?) since it didn't serve any purpose to the reader. What you saw on Usenet was a version of it, by the way. The acknowledgement at the end of the C column was not my words, but those of the columnist who was simply pay- ing tribute to Allen for his work over the years. I don't want to get into the specifics of what we pay contributors and what we were paying Allen. Our payment varies from $500 to about $1000 per article, depending on a number of factors such as length, etc. I also pay bonuses to authors who go out of their way to meet a tough deadline. I do not accept "free" articles from indi- viduals who are associated with a company. Allen was getting paid at the top of the scale, not the bottom and I didn't save any mo- ney with the new columnist. I don't look at the code associated with an article as being separate from the article. The text tells you what the author had in mind, the code tells you what the author is really saying. You can't have a DDJ article without code and Allen was getting paid (handsomely) to provide a monthly column -- this means text and code. On another subject: Our November graphics lineup looks like this: "Photorealism and Computer Graphics" "Perspectives on Graphical Interfaces" "Image Compression via Image Compilation" "Dynamic Run-Time Structures" "Mapping DOS Memory Blocks" "Inserting Ele- ments into a BASIC Integer Array" and a review of Prolog/V (in- cluded with Smalltalk/V). For our December operating system is- sue, we'll be running "Writing Portable Software" "Unix vs. Unix" "Writing OS/2 Applicationw with I/O Privledges" "Undocumented DOS Functions" "Writing Programs for MultiFinder" "LRU Algorithms" "Finding Functions from Inside Brief". January is neural networks with articles on "A Neural Net for Pattern Recognition" "Under- standing Hopfield Nets" "Neural Nets for Noise Filtering" "Streams in Unix" "Postscript Fonts". Again, if there are any other subjects you'd like to see covered, write them up and send them my way. Thanks. Jon