Hi all,

I understand that Andrew Edwards declined to have his talk recorded, and the slides have not been uploaded either.  So, what was it actually about?  The abstract is ... not exactly informative. :-P

Thanks & best wishes,

    -- Joe

On Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:09:51 -0400, Joseph Rushton Wakeling <joseph.wakeling@webdrake.net> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I understand that Andrew Edwards declined to have his talk recorded, and the
> slides have not been uploaded either.  So, what was it actually about?  The
> abstract is ... not exactly informative. :-P

I can do my best here, from memory. If I get anything wrong, please correct me!

The first part of Andrew's talk was about his personal journey to the point where he was standing before us.  Service in the Marine Corps (thank you, Andrew), an interest in computers, being someone who was always inspired to contribute to society as a software developer.  His talk included several funny anecdotes, I would not do them justice to repeat them here from my bad memory :)

So then he talked about Akeron, his company that he wants to use to promote several things.  One is helping people learn about D.  To that end, he has established the web site dtutor.org (which Andrei registered during his talk I believe).  See his announcement here:  http://forum.dlang.org/post/km6ccu$1ads$1@digitalmars.com

If I recall correctly, he has interest specifically in Natural Language Processing, and in helping people learn D.  There was also something about the USMC trying to develop some sort of software that they had difficulty finishing, and I think he wanted to help them develop that using D, but I am really quite unsure of the details on that.  I'm sure at some point, it will become more clear.

It was an unusual talk, to say the least.  And I applaud his efforts to try and help people learn how to program, especially in D.  I would like to see a premier and popular site spring out of dtutor.org.

I know this is short on details, but it was over a month ago.  Andrew, you may want to post an executive summary of your talk based on your slides, to set the record straight :)

-Steve

On 06/18/2013 11:37 PM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> I can do my best here, from memory. If I get anything wrong, please correct me!

Thanks very much for the summary.  It sounds like it was an interesting talk, and I'm sad it wasn't recorded, although I imagine Andrew had good reasons for his request.

> The first part of Andrew's talk was about his personal journey to the point where he was standing before us.  Service in the Marine Corps (thank you, Andrew), an interest in computers, being someone who was always inspired to contribute to society as a software developer.  His talk included several funny anecdotes, I would not do them justice to repeat them here from my bad memory :)
> 
> So then he talked about Akeron, his company that he wants to use to promote several things.  One is helping people learn about D.  To that end, he has established the web site dtutor.org (which Andrei registered during his talk I believe).  See his announcement here: http://forum.dlang.org/post/km6ccu$1ads$1@digitalmars.com

I hadn't connected Andrew with Tyro[17].  dtutor.org sounds very cool, although it doesn't seem to currently point to anything, at least for me (the browser starts trying to load an IP address and never gets anywhere, apart from "D Tutorials" appearing in the tab title).

> I know this is short on details, but it was over a month ago.  Andrew, you may want to post an executive summary of your talk based on your slides, to set the record straight :)

I confess that when I saw the word Åkerön, in the absence of further details I assumed it was most likely to be some kind of online fantasy RPG ... ;-)

Joseph Rushton Wakeling:

> I confess that when I saw the word Åkerön, in the absence of further details I
> assumed it was most likely to be some kind of online fantasy RPG ... ;-)

I presume Akeron is meant to ferry (carry) people toward a knowledge of D :-) The Styx represents the pain to endure to learn it, etc.

Bye,
bearophile

On 06/19/2013 01:55 AM, bearophile wrote:
> I presume Akeron is meant to ferry (carry) people toward a knowledge of D :-)
> The Styx represents the pain to endure to learn it, etc.

That's Acheron, and D was created by Digital Mars, not Digital Hades ... :-P

Amusing question -- how does everyone think it should be pronounced?  And how does Andrew pronounce it?

On 6/18/13 6:09 PM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I understand that Andrew Edwards declined to have his talk recorded, and the
> slides have not been uploaded either.  So, what was it actually about?  The
> abstract is ... not exactly informative. :-P
>
> Thanks & best wishes,
>
>      -- Joe
>

I decided not to record my talk which, in hindsight may not have been my best decision. That shouldn't have prevented the release of the slides but after reviewing the slides I came to the conclusion that the message was lost without the actual talk so I also decided against releasing them.

Steven did a great job explaining the gist of the talk (thanks) but I'll expand a little:

I've been in the military and D Programming communities for quite some time and during the presentation I tried to convey to the audience the situations that lead to me joining both; basically frustration that led to as search for better. When I stumbled across D I was just cutting my teeth on source code and in many ways I still am. While I have a grasp of the basics, I am at a lost when it comes to stringing them together to develop a system of any kind. Most of what I know I've learned lurking around the D forums and trying to read D out of Java and C++ programming books. Since I've resisted actually trying to learn those languages however, I haven't learned too much.

Though I cannot program, I have tried to support the community in every way I possibly can. Spreading the word was something simple so I tried to do that whenever and wherever I got the opportunity. I attempted to talk to a number of authors to have them look into the language and write books about it but got very few. Those that I did receive were not very positive. With the exception of two authors who, while they could not assist, began to make mention of the language in their newsletters and articles: one even went on to teach one of his courses using D (a big thank you to Chuck Allison who continues to be a fervent supporter of the language even today).

There are a couple observations that have remained constant over the past eleven years I've been lurking here in D land: 1) The documentation is seriously lacking 2) There are few tutorials (and those that exist suffer from code rot) 3) The language continues to evolve so people are unwilling to develop tools for it 4) Most projects that get started are quickly abandoned 5) People outside the community do not give it a fare shake 6) There is no IDE 7) No built in GUI library 8) Most people complain about what's not available instead of lending a hand to fix it.

One would think that after eleven years, I would have mastered the language by now. Not so because my day job doesn't allow for it. I start early in the days (up by 4AM) and end late at night (depart work about 9PM) so the little time is get to pursue programming is next to nonexistent and very precious. Needless to say, when I do find that time, I would like to pick up a book written about programming in D rather than trying to translate, in my head, books written for other languages to D. No books? Maybe some tutorials would help... wait, they don't exist either.

I'm not going to be like the people that fall under category 8. To me it's one of two simple choices, either I contribute or shut up. At this point though, I am tired of just shutting up and waiting for the condition to change. Since I'm about to transition to civilian life, what would be better than trying to help ensure the future of something I care deeply about? I took a look at the list and decided that there were only to places I can help out: I could help create tutorials (in a severely limited capacity) and continue spreading the word about the benefits of switching to D.

I have no problem with spreading the word and, in fact, have been doing it since I stumbled upon the language. But I want to do more. I want to code and actually help improve the language. In order for that to happen though I need situations 1 or 2 to be improved. So I decided to launch dtutor.org.

But the decision was the easy part. I won't be finished with my current job until summer 2014 so I have very little time. I have very little programming experience, and thus would be at a lost to try to prepare content by myself. Though I've assembled, repaired and trouble shot computers issues for 20+ years, I've never ran a server before so that presents a challenge in itself. The technology I've decided to use to build the site is written in Python (of which I know nothing) which presents quite an obstacle to get it ported to D. I've never design or participate in the design of a website before so will have to learn that.

Yeah, its pretty clear that I have bitten off a lot more than I can chew... but to me it is better than complaining about the situation and not doing anything to help. The rest of the talk was about other areas of interest I have including Natural Language Processing and Logistics Management Systems. In the big scheme of things they are significant for my future business goals but not so much for D. Though I do hope to be the proud employer of D programmers in the future.

My hope is that I can obtain some help in bringing dtutor.org to life so that people like me can have a resource to turn to when they need guidance and the nay-Sayers will have one less thing to talk about.

-- 

Andrew Edwards
--------------------
http://www.akeron.co
auto getAddress() {
    string location = "@", period = ".";
    return ("info" ~ location ~ "afidem" ~ period ~ "org");
}

On 6/18/13 8:55 PM, bearophile wrote:
> Joseph Rushton Wakeling:
>
>> I confess that when I saw the word Åkerön, in the absence of further
>> details I
>> assumed it was most likely to be some kind of online fantasy RPG ... ;-)

Back in my youth... when video games were all I could think about, that would have been a real possibility.

> I presume Akeron is meant to ferry (carry) people toward a knowledge of
> D :-) The Styx represents the pain to endure to learn it, etc.
>
> Bye,
> bearophile

That's pretty good. I like it. From now on, that's what I'll tell the people that it means. There wasn't much though that went into the name though. It's simply a combination of the first names of two very important people who remain the inspiration behind everything I do in life. I'm not kidding though, when people ask I'll give them bearophile's interpretation. It's way more creative than mine.

-- 

Andrew Edwards
--------------------
http://www.akeron.co
auto getAddress() {
    string location = "@", period = ".";
    return ("info" ~ location ~ "afidem" ~ period ~ "org");
}

On Wednesday, 19 June 2013 at 01:47:37 UTC, Tyro[17] wrote:
> My hope is that I can obtain some help in bringing dtutor.org to life so that people like me can have a resource to turn to when they need guidance and the nay-Sayers will have one less thing to talk about.

Awesome story and if you strive as you did to help dconf, you will achieve your goals.

Good luck.

On 6/18/13 8:41 PM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> On 06/18/2013 11:37 PM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> I can do my best here, from memory. If I get anything wrong, please correct me!
>
[...]
>> So then he talked about Akeron, his company that he wants to use to promote
>> several things.  One is helping people learn about D.  To that end, he has
>> established the web site dtutor.org (which Andrei registered during his talk I
>> believe).  See his announcement here:
>> http://forum.dlang.org/post/km6ccu$1ads$1@digitalmars.com
>
> I hadn't connected Andrew with Tyro[17].  dtutor.org sounds very cool, although
> it doesn't seem to currently point to anything, at least for me (the browser
> starts trying to load an IP address and never gets anywhere, apart from "D
> Tutorials" appearing in the tab title).

The site is not active at the moment... I wasted my entire month's bandwidth allocation allocation in six days trying to properly configure a server on the VPN had to move that part of my learning to a local box. Running low on funds so was not able to get one until this past Friday. I picked up a brand new Mac mini for half price, configured it to run Ubuntu 13.04 server and am playing around with that right now. As soon as I'm comfortable with setting it up I'll return configure the site.

Installing the OS of course is painless. My current issue is not knowing what configurations I should make to secure the system. Speaking with dav1d I know I at least need two accounts other than root. An administrator's account and a user with zero access to sudo. I need to set up nginx but I'm not sure to what extent I need to configure it. I have some instructions from dav1d I must revisit. After that I need to install DUB and Vibe-d and use supervisor to launch the site (not sure about supervisor at the moment will have to play with it later, do I launch nginx as root and then supervisor from the user account?). Just a couple things to sort out with the server settings.

After that's all done, will need to clone runestone and start working on porting it... that's where the real trouble begins I guess.

[...]


-- 

Andrew Edwards
--------------------
http://www.akeron.co
auto getAddress() {
    string location = "@", period = ".";
    return ("info" ~ location ~ "afidem" ~ period ~ "org");
}

On Tue, 18 Jun 2013 23:14:16 -0400, Tyro[17] <ridimz@yahoo.com> wrote:

> The site is not active at the moment... I wasted my entire month's bandwidth allocation allocation in six days trying to properly configure a server on the VPN had to move that part of my learning to a local box.

I think you need to find another hosting company...

At this point, you don't need concurrency, you need freedom of bandwidth and hard drive space.

But your current plan is good -- get it all working on a local box, then move to the server.

I think for now, an under construction site that points at dlang.org would be good.

-Steve