The ACM
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There were two journals that were published by the ACM: Communications of the ACM and Journal of the ACM. JACM specialised in computing theory and mathematically/formally oriented articles and CACM carried articles that talked about implementation details of compiler or operating system concepts. Dijkstra's famous "Goto Statement Considered Harmful" was published as a letter to the Editor in CACM, because it was too short to be considered an article. In the early days of computing, when language compilers were barely understood, there were special articles such as how to implement call-by-name in Algol, etc. Graduate students were encouraged to become members of ACM so that they could keep up with the technical trends. I consider myself to have learned more from CACM than from the classroom lectures. Later, CACM morphed into a magazine that contained very little scholarly articles -- unless you consider puff pieces on social impact of computer security and similar as scholarly articles.
Vivic wrote:
There were two journals that were published by the ACM
Not exactly sure what you mean, but the umbrella of the ACM publishes a large number of journals and has done so for decades. Perhaps you are referring to the journals directly related to the ACM itself and not the sub-organizations. http://www.acm.org/publications/journals[^]
Vivic wrote:
Graduate students were encouraged to become members of ACM so that they could keep up with the technical trends.
I remember getting the same message which might have been true in the early days. But in terms of the OP I doubt it is currently feasible. Both because of the lack of readability of most of the articles (in all of the magazines), the vast, vast breadth of software and hardware now, and because at least a non-trivial amount of the articles deal with esoteric material that is unlikely to ever be relevant (some might of course but reading all of the rest for something that might only become relevant in 5 years is an extreme stretch on the usefulness factor.)
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ITWorld wrote:
The ACM, created in 1947, is dedicated to advancing computing as a science and profession and currently has more than 100,000 members.
They must be real good at keeping a low profile. Never heard of them.
Bastard Programmer from Hell :suss: If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
Eddy Vluggen wrote:
They must be real good at keeping a low profile.
Probably true. But a quick google gave me 48 million software associated people world wide and that doesn't include hardware. So 100k isn't that big of a number. Most ACM references I have seen are usually in highly academic type articles. I have also seen ads for conferences for them in consumer technical magazines.
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I've been looking at this article for the last couple of days (OK, since yesterday): Why many programmers don’t bother joining the ACM[^], and I couldn't think of anyone I've ever known that was a member of the ACM. Do they exist? Anyone here? Is there value in it?
TTFN - Kent
I was a member of the ACM from 1980 to the early 90s, and belonged to SIGCHI and SIGART. /ravi
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