December 23, 2018
On Sun, 23 Dec 2018 at 16:05, Joakim via Digitalmars-d-announce <digitalmars-d-announce@puremagic.com> wrote:
>
> I'm not sure how a talk is supposed to inspire anything substantive _before_ you've heard it, and pre-recorded talks watched at home would fill the same purpose after.
>

No one is interested in watching pre-recorded talks.  I think I've said this before regarding the failed experiment at GHM.

> Perhaps this is a generation gap, as I see that you and Russel are a couple decades older than me, so let me give my perspective. I've probably watched a week or two of recorded tech talks online over the last year, and maybe a couple hours in person. Invariably, I find myself wishing for a skip-ahead button on those in-person talks, like I have for the online videos. ;)
>
> I suspect there are many more like me these days than you two.
>

Nope, I reckon I'm of your generation, and even I don't understand you. :-)

If you don't like human interaction, that's your problem.  Don't tell others that they shouldn't meet up once yearly to talk about subjects that interests them greatly.

Meanwhile, I'll be having fun at Dconf next year...

-- 
Iain
December 23, 2018
On 12/22/18 12:22 PM, Joakim wrote:
> On Saturday, 22 December 2018 at 17:13:06 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
>> On Saturday, 22 December 2018 at 16:57:10 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>>
>>> I'm not trying to discuss it with you or the community. I'm asking the D team who're making this decision why it's being made, despite all the reasoning in that thread, and reiterating that it's a bad move. I suspect they're not thinking this through, but they can speak for themselves.
>>
>> The decision was made because your reasoning failed to convince anyone involved in the planning that maintaining the current format of DConf is a mistake. Nor do they agree with you that it's a bad move. We like the current format and see no need to change it at this time.
> 
> I see, so you admit no reasoning was involved on your part? Because you present none, either there or here.

Huh? It's their decision, not yours. Even if the decision has no reason at all, it's still theirs. What is the problem? Start your own D "conference competitor" if you think you can do better.

> 
>> If you would like to carry on another debate about this, please open another thread in thhe General forum. This one isn't the place for it. Thanks!
> 
> As I just noted, I don't care to "debate" it with people who make no arguments. Instead, I'm asking you or whoever made this horrible decision why it's being made.

Nobody cares to debate something that has already been scheduled and planned, the time to bring up concerns was earlier, when you brought it up before. But that failed to convince, now it's decided, time to move on.

> If it's such a great idea, that should be an easy case to make, compared to the alternatives given. Yet all I get is a bunch of stone-walling, suggesting no reasoning was actually involved, just blindly aping others and the past.

It is easy, for those who have attended conferences and like them -- they work well. All past dconfs are shining examples. Just drop it and move on to something else. You lost the battle for this one, it's no longer up for discussion.

-Steve
December 23, 2018
On Sunday, 23 December 2018 at 10:07:40 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> BTW, another point for the presentations is that we cover the air fare and hotel expenses for the presenters. Quite a lot of people have been able to attend because of this. It's our way of giving a little bit back to strong contributors.


I'll take that to assume you aren't paying for your own ticket, your own hotel expenses, etc. I wonder if you would feel differently about this if you had to pay for all these out of your own pocket. I'd be curious of the total expenses for DConf, all of the funds could be used to hire more developers. The pull request situation has improves significantly, I can only imagine what else could improve with those additional funds. I think it'd fair to outline how much does end up being spent on DConf and do a logical comparison of money being spent relatively. I know how you feel about owing people of the your community nothing though, so I guess it's a nice dream. Without those statistics to include with the argument it's pointless to argue with you, might as well be arguing whether unicorns exist.
December 23, 2018
On 12/23/2018 3:40 PM, Rubn wrote:
> I'll take that to assume you aren't paying for your own ticket, your own hotel expenses, etc. I wonder if you would feel differently about this if you had to pay for all these out of your own pocket.

I paid my own expenses for DConf. So did many of the speakers (or the company they worked for).

> I can only imagine what else could improve with those additional funds.

Many people have donated generously to the D Foundation. The tickets sales do not cover the entire cost of the conference, the rest is made up for by the Foundation and the sponsor(s). We've kept the ticket prices low to enable more people to come. If there were profits, they'd accrue to the D Foundation, not me.

If you have specific things you want funded, you can donate with the proviso that the donation go to that thing.
December 24, 2018
On Saturday, 22 December 2018 at 12:18:25 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> Thanks to Symmetry Investments, DConf is heading to London! We're still ironing out the details, but I've been sitting on this for weeks and, now that we have a venue, I just can't keep quiet about it any longer.

Looking forward to it! The caliber of people at these conferences has been exceptional every year I've gone, and many of the ideas presented have been very valuable, whether they were directly related to DLang or not.

Just one small example was a 2017 talk by Bastiaan Veelo on D libraries implementing Parsing Expression Grammars, which I had never heard of at the time. But the idea ended up being very useful for greatly simplifying the interfaces of systems I was working on that year.


I've been doing quite a bit of work this year on the Google S2 Geometric Library in D. If I can benchmark the library against the C++ version or show how it can be used to tackle some of the trickier real-time problems in large-scale web services, would it be a good candidate to try to make into a talk for the conference?
December 24, 2018
I'm just some random guy but for what it's worth the recorded talks at DConf are valuable to me. I don't much care what format the conference takes or if we even continue to have them since it's not often practical for me to attend anyway, but I would miss the talks. It would be cool if the community would put out a standalone lecture or two throughout the year between DConfs. Please apply lessons learned this time to make sure all the lectures eventually make it to YouTube in decent quality. Thanks for the work ya'll do.
December 24, 2018
On 12/24/18 2:44 AM, Joakim wrote:
> On Sunday, 23 December 2018 at 22:36:05 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>>
>> Huh? It's their decision, not yours. Even if the decision has no reason at all, it's still theirs. What is the problem? Start your own D "conference competitor" if you think you can do better.
> 
> They are accountable to the community, so the decision and its reasons matter.

My impression is that the community likes and benefits from these conferences, so everything's cool there.

> I, for one, will not be donating to the foundation as long as they continue to waste money this way, just as others have said they won't donate as long as it doesn't put out a Vision document anymore or otherwise communicate what it's doing with their money.

Nobody is asking for your money for this conference (unless you want to attend), and if you feel this way, that's totally your choice. I like the results that come from the conferences, I've been to all of them since 2013, on my dime for 3, and with assistance for 3. I felt it was 100% worth it for all.

>> Nobody cares to debate something that has already been scheduled and planned, the time to bring up concerns was earlier, when you brought it up before. But that failed to convince, now it's decided, time to move on.
> 
> So you agree with me that there's no point in "debating" it again, perhaps you should have addressed this comment to Mike then?

Mike didn't start the debate in this thread, you did. Consider how one feels when careful deliberation is made, and a final decision, combined with an announcement is made. Would you like to have people question your decisions AFTER they are made, and commitments have already been established? The time to question them is before they are made, not after. Questioning after is simply viewed (rightly) as sour grapes. You didn't get your way, move on.

>>> If it's such a great idea, that should be an easy case to make, compared to the alternatives given. Yet all I get is a bunch of stone-walling, suggesting no reasoning was actually involved, just blindly aping others and the past.
>>
>> It is easy, for those who have attended conferences and like them -- they work well. All past dconfs are shining examples. Just drop it and move on to something else. You lost the battle for this one, it's no longer up for discussion.
> 
> Heh, there was no "battle," as most of those responding didn't even understand what I wrote, like Iain above, gave no arguments (we "like them -- they work well"), and as finally clear from Mike and Walter's responses here, there was no real deliberation on the matter.

You think they just flipped a coin one day, and didn't think about any past experience at all? No real thinking must have gone into it because only intelligent people can come to the conclusion you reached, right? This kind of "debate" where the assumption is that only my way is correct is common out there these days, it's tiring. The best thing you can do is start a competing conference style and show how it works better. I'm sure Walter and Andrei would not discourage more D conferences or conference-like gatherings.

> Since they don't take DConf seriously, I see no reason to either: I'll just start ignoring it from now on.

That's unfortunate, but not anything I can change. You have contributed a lot in terms of the android port, although I haven't really programmed in android (I have a tiny bit, with Xamarin (hated it) and a bit with Java (was OK, but crazy complicated) ). I hope at some point you reconsider, I'd love to see a presentation on it.

-Steve
December 24, 2018
On 12/24/2018 2:22 PM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> I'm sure Walter and Andrei would not discourage more D conferences or conference-like gatherings.
Speaking for myself (and I'm sure Andrei would agree) we're all for it.
December 24, 2018
On 12/24/2018 4:30 AM, Vijay Nayar wrote:
> I've been doing quite a bit of work this year on the Google S2 Geometric Library in D. If I can benchmark the library against the C++ version or show how it can be used to tackle some of the trickier real-time problems in large-scale web services, would it be a good candidate to try to make into a talk for the conference?

Sounds like a good idea!
December 25, 2018
On Monday, 24 December 2018 at 12:30:57 UTC, Vijay Nayar wrote:
> Looking forward to it! The caliber of people at these conferences has been exceptional every year I've gone, and many of the ideas presented have been very valuable, whether they were directly related to DLang or not.
>
> Just one small example was a 2017 talk by Bastiaan Veelo on D libraries implementing Parsing Expression Grammars, which I had never heard of at the time. But the idea ended up being very useful for greatly simplifying the interfaces of systems I was working on that year.

Thank you Vijay, that’s nice to hear!

Bastiaan.