A while ago ACM embarked on an ambitious mission: to change their flagship publication, Communications of the ACM, for Association for Computing Machinery members, in to the JAMA of Computer Science. If this new issue of the re-designed CACM is any indication, they will succeed. In the first few pages we have quantum computing, modeling to eliminate errors in software, an analysis of cloud computing, a debate about the future of the computer science curriculum and what it means for their career path as programming becomes offshored, and the history of the IT industry in India.

.. and I'm only on page 33.

There are 112 pages.

It use to be that way - back from the inception of CACM on through the 1970s the magazine was a collection of computer science research for the academic professional. However, as the 1980s and 1990s moved computers in to people's homes and the IT field changed from Phds toying with large Turing machines to undergrads who used Visual Basic and Java for basic business purposes, the magazine changed. These new practitioners didn't come from the academic field, didn't really understand the basic underpinnings of a computer, and usually didn't care. The funding of the ACM dried up as well, even as the number of people in the field boomed. The CACM changed to grab these people by becoming more of a mainstream magazine geared towards those new entrants - maybe to attract these people to the ACM membership. It didn't seem to work. The magazine lost its way.

Now we are once again approaching a change in the computer science field. Much like the way Cloud Computing is taking us back to the large machines in the back rooms and thin clients at the edge, software engineering is changing back from large numbers of engineers with basic knowledge to a smaller number with more specialized knowledge. The Googles of this world are not as worried about basic applications written across millions of detached machines - things that usually create reusable patterns and easy software construction from a weekend's reading of O'Reilly books. Instead, they are worried about problems of concurrency, massively scalable storage systems and parallel processing while sharing the same memory space. The choice of the language has changed to an implementation detail to express these ideas and can be interchangeable. These problems require knowledge of tuples and binary trees and graph theory, to name a few.

At the same time programming jobs that boomed in the 90s and 00s are being outsourced to cheaper and cheaper labor overseas with the harder proofs being demonstrated once on the internet and then communicated across the world for others to incorporate. Pre-packaged software for businesses are becoming more configurable to existing systems and removing the need for custom software from programmers in non-software companies. This means that those who are serious about the profession are diving deeper in to the roles of architect, designer and academic - while those whom aren't as interested are moving on to other careers. These two changes are providing an entrance for a journal like CACM to come alive again and publish the best research available needed to solve these hard problems.

The new CACM couldn't come at a better time.