Dr. Dobb's Code Talk: A Community Forum -- And More!

Over the past couple of weeks, we've had plenty of opportunity to talk about source code. Let's see, there was the "Beautiful Code" panel at SD West (thanks to all of you who contributed your definition of beautiful code; I'm still working through that stack of e-mail). Then there is the upcoming May issue on "Programming Languages" in which, among other things, we talk with Paul Jansen about the Tiobe Programming Community Index language popularity. Then there's Mike Riley's reporting from the Python Conference 2008 this past weekend. You get the idea...

But what we've known for a long time is that topics such as programming languages and beautiful (and ugly) code are interesting (and fun) to talk about -- but we didn't have a proper forum to do so. Until now.

So let me introduce you to Dr. Dobb's Code Talk, a forum for discussing issues du jour when it comes to programmers and programming. The forum has been underway for a couple of days already, and is already packed with posts ranging from Walter Bright's Invariant Strings and Nick Plante's Those Other Ruby Frameworks to Christopher Diggins wildly popular Learn as Many Languages as You Can (or just learn Scala) and an audio interview with Python creator Guido van Rossum.

And that's just for starters.

To get the ball rolling, we've lined up an array of great contributors -- Walter Bright, Jack Woehr, Jocelyn Paine, James Reinders, Christopher Diggins, Mark Nelson, Barr Bauer, and Jim McCarthy, among others. All of these contributors have long proven they have the technical chops, and they're great writers on topics such as AI, databases, language design, debugging, irritating bosses, concurrency, and more.

But here's another cool part: Dr. Dobb's Code Talk is not just about these contributors spouting off about this or that -- it's also about you having the opportunity to share your 2 cents. So not only does Dr. Dobb's Code Talk have a powerful (and easy to use) threaded comment section, it is also designed to let you set up your own blog. Code Talk "Members" have already launched their own blogs, like Daniel Stoleru's Write literate! blog and Gernot Heiser's on Singularity vs L4.

So come on and join the fun! Try it and see. You'll like it -- I guarantee it.

But wait! There's more! One of the topics we examine in an upcoming issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal is "programming contests." They're everywhere, it seems. So not to be left out, we've launched our own contest that will be fun, and just maybe put some spare change in your pocket. Dr. Dobb's Challenge is a special game modding competition in which you can win from a prize pool of $10,000. You can do this by downloading our specially created "Dr. Dobb's Challenge" game for either Windows and Windows Mobile, and modifying it using a copy of Visual Studio 2008.

Rules, guidelines, FAQs, and more information are available at Dr. Dobb's Challenge. The deadline for the overall competition is June 13, while the deadline for a special "First Month Challenge" is April 14. Don't waste time! Get started now! And let me know if you have any questions.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Posted by Jon Erickson at 03:31 PM  Permalink