On Saturday, 7 May 2016 at 01:19:43 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> Yes, my wife went for an interview there out of college :) The snow banks were like 6 feet high!

hehe, yeah, we had some beast winters recently too. This last one was pretty mild in comparison, but the one before was one of the coldest on record - I don't think it got above freezing once in the entire month of February, and the snow really piled up. The year previous had a moderate ice storm followed by record snowfalls (and significant cold, though it did thaw a couple times, thankfully).

The snow banks indeed got very tall, typical corner was like five feet, and where driveway plows shoved it, some were like eight feet up. (Popular intersections aren't as bad since the city will send trucks to dump it in the river, but that's just not feasible to do everywhere.)

And this is why I prefer riding my bike. People call me nuts for this, but my eyes sit higher on the bike than almost any motor vehicle, so I can see over more, are like 18 inches off the front wheel instead of several feet like in a car, so I don't have to creep out so far to see around things, and my ears still work, no engine noise to jam them up.

As a result, on the bike, I'm far more aware of surroundings than in the car; those advantages more than make up for the lack of mirrors. Moreover, the bike is a lot easier to stop than a car, there's a lot of advantages.

It is just cold.

> P.S. if it were to be a serious consideration, I'm all for it!

Well, we couldn't literally use my house, it isn't that big, but I do know people with larger spaces and there are business class hotels up here... and the little Watertown airport is pretty nice to use (it only offers service to Philadelphia, but from there you can change planes to get wherever).

We also have easy access to Canada!

But it'd prolly be completely unaffordable for the Europeans anyway :(

On 05/06/2016 10:13 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> The atmosphere here is great, and I'm curious how it feels for those who
> are watching remotely. Is the experience good? What can we do better?
>

The livestream videos requiring flash was a bit of an issue.

> Also: we're talking about the DConf 2017 location. Please share any
> initial thoughts!
>

Cleveland!

On Saturday, 7 May 2016 at 13:10:37 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Please curb off-topic discussions and mark them with [OT], yadda yadda yadda. Thanks! -- Andrei

When people complain about the D forums, they aren't complaining about infrequent OT stuff. Random tangents about the weather naturally fizzle out after five or six posts and don't leave hard feelings.

The bigger problem we have is that things get discussed without a plan of action that actually gets followed through on. How can we forget the `virtual` debacle? That's the real spam on the forum: a long thread where things are discussed, people believe a decision is reached, code gets implemented.... then all mysteriously dropped.

On the other hand, new things pop up from apparently nowhere. We have these roadmap documents twice a year but they don't seem to be very meaningful.

What I think would help on the forum is if actual work is discussed in real time, something like the main contributors to check in every other day and tell us what they're working on and what they're working toward. No need to discuss it at length, that'd get counter-productive, but just take a few minutes for you and Walter and others to say "I'm working on big-O right now which will help with containers, and plan to continue that throughout the week." or "I decided to shift gears and play with 64 bit exception handling because it will help C++ interop."

Like the agile stand up meeting idea, though even less formal. Just so the community has *frequent* updates on the short-term direction to complement the longer term direction laid out in the 2016 H1/H2 documents.

Not so anyone gets to input on it, but just so we feel inspired. My review of merged pull requests at the end of the week sort of gets there, but it is hard for me to get past the surface, I can only see a summary after-the-fact with little indication of why or how it fits into your development plans.

Think how much more productive the forum would appear if people - including you and Walter! - actually talked about ongoing projects on it instead of primarily just proposals.

On Saturday, 7 May 2016 at 13:30:28 UTC, Daniel Kozak wrote:
> The zero is a point when water became an ice, so anything below zero means snow and anything above means rain :)

Except it doesn't quite work that way.... you can get snow when it is a above freezing if the humidity is low enough. In Fahrenheit, anything in the thirties is borderline, and twenties is snow territory.

In Celsius, the snow line is more like 3 degrees than zero.

Besides, zero is just as arbitrary as thirty-two (which, btw, is a power of two*) and easy to remember if you use it anyway! I know a lot of people who don't know that water boiling point is around 212 F at standard pressure (interestingly, and not entirely coincidentally, 180 degrees away from freezing) - but if they don't know it and never found a need to, doesn't that indicate that it isn't important information to know?


* I really think that's the main difference between American units and the others - base two vs base ten. Base two is superior in basically every way, but base ten is more newbie friendly for doing irrelevant conversions.

On Saturday, 7 May 2016 at 15:15:23 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> Think how much more productive the forum would appear if people - including you and Walter! - actually talked about ongoing projects on it instead of primarily just proposals.

Oh, one more important point: I sometimes I want to randomly blog D changes here, but I don't feel it fits in, so I limit myself to pretty rare announcements (especially since my code is more of a living document than discrete releases).

If you guys posted little things ongoing, the length need be no more than a tweet, I'm sure others would too, and then we'd know of more projects and might even work together.

On Sat, 2016-05-07 at 15:17 +0000, Adam D. Ruppe via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> 
[…]
> Besides, zero is just as arbitrary as thirty-two (which, btw, is a power of two*) and easy to remember if you use it anyway! I
[…]

0 is a power of two as well.

> * I really think that's the main difference between American units and the others - base two vs base ten. Base two is superior in basically every way, but base ten is more newbie friendly for doing irrelevant conversions.

They are not American units, they are Imperial units. Well except that Americans give the same name to different values of the dimension.

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

On 07-May-2016 19:50, Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Sat, 2016-05-07 at 15:17 +0000, Adam D. Ruppe via Digitalmars-d
> wrote:
>>
> […]
>> Besides, zero is just as arbitrary as thirty-two (which, btw, is
>> a power of two*) and easy to remember if you use it anyway! I
> […]
>
> 0 is a power of two as well.

0 is not a power of two. Any power of non-negative number is > 0.

>
>> * I really think that's the main difference between American
>> units and the others - base two vs base ten. Base two is superior
>> in basically every way, but base ten is more newbie friendly for
>> doing irrelevant conversions.
>
> They are not American units, they are Imperial units. Well except that
> Americans give the same name to different values of the dimension.
>


-- 
Dmitry Olshansky

On Friday, 6 May 2016 at 14:13:35 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>
> Also: we're talking about the DConf 2017 location. Please share any initial thoughts!

This was my first DConf, and it was great to meet people that I had only seen online (sometimes only by handle). On dconf.org I read: "DConf is the main face-to-face event for everyone and everything related to the D language and environment." So that kind of aligns with what I think its goal should be. Imvho, the goal is not to market D to people who don't know about D / are not (planning to be) involved already.
With that in mind, I think it'd be good to select a location based on where folks in the D community will be able/willing to travel to.

(for me personally, northern Europe is best. Japan I would try to join too ;-))

2016-05-07 17:15 GMT+02:00 Adam D. Ruppe via Digitalmars-d < digitalmars-d@puremagic.com>:

> On Saturday, 7 May 2016 at 13:10:37 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>
>> Please curb off-topic discussions and mark them with [OT], yadda yadda yadda. Thanks! -- Andrei
>>
>
> When people complain about the D forums, they aren't complaining about infrequent OT stuff. Random tangents about the weather naturally fizzle out after five or six posts and don't leave hard feelings.
>
>
That's your POV. And in my POV, the forums are useless for working on D
because of the amount of digressions.
I'm not opposed to a section to discuss whatever off-topic subject is
trendy, but I wouldn't read it. When I  a thread about Fibers, lambda or
templates, I don't expect nor am looking for a comparison of metric /
imperial system, why esperanto failed to take off or the history or the
history of LISP in the 80's.

That being said, I would love the next DConf to be somewhere in Europe,
potentially Berlin (where I live).
I believe Europe is where most of the community is anyway. The question is
do we want the conference to be at a fixed location so planning is easier
and success is more predictable or do we want to favour diversity and move
it around ?

In any case it should be accessible. As nice as the Salt Lake City location was, it was not easily accessible for everyone. When looking at the flight price (in November or December), it was twice as expensive to fly to SLL (from Berlin, using Air France) than to fly to LA / SF. So I'd favor New York over Boston for example.

Also, people travelling far (and unsponsored) are likely to take the occasion to spend a couple of days around. For the 2015 edition I flew in the week-end before, and finding an hotel room was more challenging than expected since it was memorial day.

On Saturday, 7 May 2016 at 15:15:23 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Saturday, 7 May 2016 at 13:10:37 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> Please curb off-topic discussions and mark them with [OT], yadda yadda yadda. Thanks! -- Andrei
>
> When people complain about the D forums, they aren't complaining about infrequent OT stuff. Random tangents about the weather naturally fizzle out after five or six posts and don't leave hard feelings.
>

You already made more than 5 or 6 OT post yourself.