I feel particularly knotty about this news because I pitched Peter a magazine idea back in February '10. Pasting in the initial email for reference here, and to

I feel particularly knotty about this news because I pitched Peter a magazine idea back in February '10. Pasting in the initial email for reference here, and to close the loop: --- Subject: Maybe a magazine. Hi Peter. I read your comment about starting another book after "Coders at Work", and thought I should pitch you an idea... Instead of a book, consider creating a magazine. An intelligent forum for essays and articles discussing the nitty-gritty of the software topics covered by "Coders at Work" would be an invaluable resource. It's a hole that's being filled poorly by discussions on blogs, Hacker News, freenode, and Google Groups. You're in somewhat of a unique position, with the connections to solicit contributions from the leading lights, so to speak. Here's a hypothetical table of contents, just for kicks: * Brendan Eich on ECMAScript5. * A critical reading of The TeXbook. * Build your own homoiconic mini-language. * A brief history of exceptions. * Thomas Ptacek on safely storing passwords. * Fun with Octrees. * Visualizing strange attractors. * How to implement significant whitespace. ... and so on. Naturally, the magazine wouldn't have to be print-only, or even print-first. I'd imagine that every article would exist first on the web, with groups of them getting packaged up into issues every month or two, and made available for purchase using MagCloud or LuLu. With programmers as your target audience, I think it could do quite well. I think you're one of the few people out there with incredible writing chops, and a deep understanding of code, so... it's just a thought. Cheers, -- Jeremy Ashkenas