Soon or later it was bound to happen. No one can escape the general trend. Magazines are fading away, giving space to on-line contents, be that blogs or knowledge collector sites. The good Doctor, the one that started back in the seventies, when BASIC was considered the technological frontier and 8 bit with single-digit k of RAM was cutting edge technology, the Journal of Calisthenics & Orthodontia that I read since the late eighties and thus have been with more longer than my wife herself; the running light without overbyte that has been the base for my continuous learning over two decades, well this magazine will be no longer.
Like the C/C++ User Journal that ceased to print a couple of years ago, DDJ is going to change name to “DDJ Report” and be a few page inlet of another magazine (Information Week).
It is plain sad because this was The Programmer’s Magazine, the one that stood out of the crowd. With an unique taste for practical and pragmatic approach, with an open eye both to new and current technologies.
As in “the king is dead, long life to the king”, also DDJ is not really dead – in fact it is going to continue its existence in on-line form. The website will continue to host quality articles as well as forum and blogs.
What I will miss for sure is the package (you can actually read magazines really everywhere) and the chance to peek (just to remain with BASIC idiom) stuff I am not working on. In fact, it is true that you can find everything on Internet, but it is true that it is not delivered monthly at your door and it is unlikely you want to spend time to search stuff you don’t even know about.