wfp@dasys1.UUCP (William Phillips) (09/09/88)
Reposted without comment from comp.lang.c:
==============================================================================
From: indra@amdcad.AMD.COM (Indra Singhal)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.misc,comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.sys.apple,comp.sys.mac
Subject: Allen Holub on DDJ & C-Chest (long)
Keywords: DDJ, C-Chest, final editorial.
Message-ID: <22873@amdcad.AMD.COM>
Date: 8 Sep 88 18:05:29 GMT
Organization: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., Sunnyvale, Ca.
Lines: 123
I have been a casual reader of Dr. Dobbs Journal of Software Tools
for some time now. When I saw a recent issue of DDJ I noticed that
the C Chest column was missing. I wondered but did not think too
much about it - until I had the opportunity to meet Mr Allen Holub
in person at a UC Berkeley gathering.
While speaking to him I found out that the disappearance of
the C-Chest had more to it than the casual (or even regular) reader
would know. I did not think Mr Holub got a fair shake from DDJ so
I offered to post his final column for him.
What follows are his own words, unedited. Like he says, feel
free to distribute it. The opinions expressed are Mr Holubs and do
not have any connection with me nor with my employers. Please treat it
as such.
--
Indra K. Singhal
{ucbvax,decwrl,allegra}!amdcad!indra
indra@amdcad.AMD.COM
----------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 6 Sep 88 17:12:18 PDT
From: holub@violet.Berkeley.EDU
Indra, Here's the editorial that I promised you at the Extension seminar.
I hope you find it entertaining. Feel free to spread it around.
-Allen
The following editorial was supposed to appear in the August Dr. Dobbs
Journal. It did not. I'll let you read it and then make a few more comments.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Running Light
Allen Holub
This month's issue contains the last C Chest column. The decision to terminate
the column was made over my objections, and without any reason given to me.
In fact, the decision was so precipitous that two C Chests that I've already
written will not appear in DDJ. It's a decision that I can't say I'm very
happy about. I can only conjecture about the reasons for the termination,
so this editorial will discuss the economics of the publishing business.
You can draw your own conclusions.
You may not have know it, but you, the reader, are a commodity that a
magazine sells to its advertisers. A magazine, in the mind of a publisher,
exists only as a vehicle for advertisements, and it is in the interests of
the publisher to maximize the amount of advertisements. Enough editorial
material must be presented so that you'll buy the magazine, but that's the
only purpose of this material. (In fact, you may have noticed that the
percentage of DDJ that's devoted to advertisements has been getting larger
and larger.) In a programming magazine, the other thing that's for sale is
the code. The magazine can sell the code directly, or it can sell it indirectly
by giving it away in order to sell more magazines. Finally, it's in the
interests of the publisher to pay contributors as little as possible. A penny
saved is a penny earned.
How does all this relate to the C Chest? Well, first of all, the programs
in C Chest were significant (and useful) programs. Unfortunately, these
programs were sometimes relatively large (at least by magazine standards),
and the space used for listings can not be used for advertisements. The fact
that looking at significant programs is a useful exercise, even if you're
not going to use the program itself, is immaterial. Similarly, the fact that
a large program may contain many useful subroutines is not germane.
Your needs don't count, as long as you continue to buy DDJ and read the ads.
Another economic issue is payment to the author. It takes time to write a
program. I was paid for the time it took to write an article, but the code
was developed on my own time for all practical purposes. Since I have to eat,
I would occasionally sell a program for a small amount of money (usually
$20-$30) in order to supplement the small amount I was paid by the magazine.
It was this supplementary money that made it possible to give you the quality
of code that I did. The printed listings were there for the majority of you,
who didn't need an entire program. The listings were available electronically
(often for less than the download costs) if you didn't want to type. Everybody
benefited. Money that I get by selling my own code, however, is money that
doesn't go into the coffers of M&T publishing, and the publisher is evidently
unwilling to pay for the development time required for even a small program
--at least that option was never presented to me.
As I said, you can draw your own conclusions. I am sorry to be giving
up the C Chest. It was fun. I especially enjoyed sharing my own code with you
and I hope that the programs were as useful to you as they were to myself.
I'm truly sorry to go. As they say in the village, "be seeing you."
---------------------------------------------------------------
... end of editorial. I want to add some more comments though:
First, DDJ is no longer a magazine "by" programmers. There was
a time when programmers ran the magazine, but the people now in charge
are just MBA's with little or no real interest in programming or programmers
other than exploiting them to make a buck. The current publisher is an ex ad
man. As such, they have no real understanding of what's important to a
programmer, or what a useful program even looks like. For example, the last
(and unprinted C Chest) was a troff preprocessor that let you create drawings
with a WYSIWYG drafting program on an IBM-PC (it generates troff primitives that
could be imbedded in any troff document). Anyone who uses troff (and tries to
use PIC) immediateley understands how useful this program is, and a significant
percentage of DDJ's readers are Unix users. Moreover, as usual, there were
a lot of useful parts to the program--subroutines that would be useful in
many applications other than troff preprocessors. The editor didn't know
what he was looking at, however.
You can really see the problem in the column that replaced C Chest. It is
written by someone who, by his own admission, doesn't know the C language.
He spent most of the first column talking about pretty basic stuff that's
of little interest to someone who's as technically competant as most of DDJ's
readers. Since the current editor, Jon Erickson, has said publicly (on
CompuServe among other places) that he is not downgrading the quality of the
magazine, I can only surmize that he doesn't know enough to recognize quality
(or lack thereof) when he sees it.
I realize that the foregoing sounds bitter, but I'm pretty bitter about what
happended. I was fired in the sleazyest possible manner, for no reason and
without notice. (In fact, Ericson had had lunch with me a week earlier, and
he was telling me how much of an asset the C Chest was for DDJ, he then
turned around and fired me the next week without a word of explanation).
Moreover, my readers were not told what happened---quite the contrary: the
last paragraphs of the new column (that replaced C Chest) imply that I left the
magazine on good terms and that I just wanted to move on to other things.
To my mind, this is an outright lie. It's not fair to me and it's not fair to
you, but it seems indicative of the level of honesty that's at work. It seems
likely that Erickson thought that if enough people found out what really
went on, that subscriptions might drop. To that end, please spread the word
about what happened. Your welcome to distribute this letter as you see fit.
-Allen Holub
==============================================================================
--
William Phillips {allegra,philabs,cmcl2}!phri\
Big Electric Cat Public Unix {bellcore,cmcl2}!cucard!dasys1!wfp
New York, NY, USA !!! JUST SAY "NO" TO OS/2 !!!