http://www.serversidemagazine.com/news/10-questions-with-facebook-research-engineer-andrei-alexandrescu/

Andrei

On 1/29/12 4:34 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> http://www.serversidemagazine.com/news/10-questions-with-facebook-research-engineer-andrei-alexandrescu/

Should have looked first, it's on reddit already. Please vote up :o).

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/p229i/10_questions_with_facebook_research_engineer/


Andrei

On Sunday, 29 January 2012 at 22:35:32 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 1/29/12 4:34 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> http://www.serversidemagazine.com/news/10-questions-with-facebook-research-engineer-andrei-alexandrescu/
>
> Should have looked first, it's on reddit already. Please vote up :o).
>
> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/p229i/10_questions_with_facebook_research_engineer/
>
>
> Andrei

:)

On Sunday, 29 January 2012 at 22:34:19 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> I wish I’d convince a serious hacker to bring things to the point where
> <?d writeln("Hello, world!"); ?>
> could be inserted in a web page.

That's very easy.

About 100 lines of simple string manipulation makes it
happen: http://arsdnet.net/dcode/dhp.d

$ ./dhp
hello <?d writef("%s", "andrei"); ?>!
<press control d>
hello andrei!
$

Set up a shebang or htaccess rule or something like that,
and boom, you have it on the web.

But, I'd question the utility of it. I wrote that dhp.d script
over a year ago, and have never actually used it.

"Andrei Alexandrescu" <SeeWebsiteForEmail@erdani.org> wrote in message news:jg4hhb$kll$1@digitalmars.com...
> http://www.serversidemagazine.com/news/10-questions-with-facebook-research-engineer-andrei-alexandrescu/
>

"we tried hard to make off-the-shelf tools work at the scale and quality we need them to, failed, and had to write our own."

Yea, I get tired very quickly of defending NiH. Anti-NiH sentiments soudns great in theory, but the rality is that most off-the-shelf software just plain sucks - *especially* off-the-shelf web software.

"I wish I'd convince a serious hacker to bring things to the point where <?d writeln("Hello, world!"); ?> could be inserted in a web page."

God no. You'll never convince a serious hacker to do that, becuase if you *could* convince them, they wouldn't be a very serious hacker to begin with.

Web-front-end people learned a long time ago, from hard experience, that that's a terrible approach to server-side code on the web. No serious web software does that anymore, except maybe when limited to carefully-simplistic uses inside the "HTML templates" waaay off deep into the "view" section of MVC.

The whole industry's moved over keeping server-side code out of the HTML, and using plain-old-code to drive an HTML-template presentation system (and that transition started as long as about ten years ago - My first taste of it was the [now old and mediocre] ASP.NET). I'd argue that, even better than that, we should be replacing the "HTML templates" with Adam's brilliant approach of "Server-side HTML DOM" (primarily limited to a presentation module, of course).

On 1/29/2012 2:34 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> http://www.serversidemagazine.com/news/10-questions-with-facebook-research-engineer-andrei-alexandrescu/

Nice, I enjoyed reading it.

2012/1/29 Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail@erdani.org>:
> http://www.serversidemagazine.com/news/10-questions-with-facebook-research-engineer-andrei-alexandrescu/
>
> Andrei

Learn how to learn?  Could you elaborate, please?  How did you learn how to learn?

On 1/29/2012 6:16 PM, Caligo wrote:
> Learn how to learn?  Could you elaborate, please?  How did you learn
> how to learn?

I can't speak for Andrei, but I discovered after 4 years of university that I had become much better at learning new things. I attribute it to becoming more efficient at what kinds of effort I needed to make to master new material - I knew what worked for me and what didn't.

One also cannot help but get better at anticipating what kinds of things will be on the examinations, so that's what you focus on.

Walter:

> On 1/29/2012 6:16 PM, Caligo wrote:
> > Learn how to learn?  Could you elaborate, please?  How did you learn how to learn?
> 
> I can't speak for Andrei, but I discovered after 4 years of university that I had become much better at learning new things.

It's meta-learning (second order learning). There is a page on Wikipedia, but it's too much short and its quality is too much low:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_learning

I believe that learning how to learn better is probably the most important thing to learn at the University. If you get good enough at learning, then many other things in life become possible. There are situations were people change (learn) how they learn to learn (third order learning), but this is a bit psychologically painful (I have not found stuff on Wikipedia about this, so you need to search in primary sources, like books by Seymour Papert).

Bye,
bearophile

On 1/29/12 4:52 PM, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Sunday, 29 January 2012 at 22:34:19 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> I wish I’d convince a serious hacker to bring things to the point where
>> <?d writeln("Hello, world!"); ?>
>> could be inserted in a web page.
>
> That's very easy.
>
> About 100 lines of simple string manipulation makes it
> happen: http://arsdnet.net/dcode/dhp.d
>
> $ ./dhp
> hello <?d writef("%s", "andrei"); ?>!
> <press control d>
> hello andrei!
> $
>
> Set up a shebang or htaccess rule or something like that,
> and boom, you have it on the web.
>
> But, I'd question the utility of it. I wrote that dhp.d script
> over a year ago, and have never actually used it.

The difficult part is integrating with Apache.

Andrei