On Thu, 09 May 2013 10:26:46 -0400
Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail@erdani.org> wrote:

> On 5/9/13 10:26 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> > With all this focus on technicalities, we forgot to discuss the gist of it: what did you guys think of the talk?
> >
> 
> That should better go in the digitalmars.D group though...
> 

Very good talk! And good production quality, too. This would be a great thing to point people towards to introduce them to D.

And Walter does a good job on stage. *Never* comes across as pretentious, or cocky or full-of-...various things...like *cough*a certain former Apple leader*cough* always did. (Minor nit: Forgot to mention Mono-D on the last question, though.)

I love the D-like line on the first slide. Kind of a strange API being used ;), but quintessentially D syntax. Cute :) The "100 lines of boilerplate" bit was great too. Made me cheer even though no one else was around.

I don't know whether it's something still under wraps or if I just need
to wait for Manu's presentation video, but I'd love to hear about how
Remedy is, or is planning to, use D. I've complained on occasion about
some of the directions a lot of the game industry has been going, but
Remedy is one developer I've always respected (Max Payne is fantastic,
I have both of them, and I remember enjoying Death Rally back in
the day - anxious to try the new one, too.) Besides, how can anything
born out of Future Crew not be awesome? :)

Maybe I overlooked this somewhere on dconf.org, but just out of curiosity, about how many attendees did the whole conference have?

On Thu, 09 May 2013 17:32:18 -0400, Nick Sabalausky <SeeWebsiteToContactMe@semitwist.com> wrote:

> I don't know whether it's something still under wraps or if I just need
> to wait for Manu's presentation video, but I'd love to hear about how
> Remedy is, or is planning to, use D.

You will hear.  Was one of my favorites.

-Steve

On 5/9/13 5:32 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> Maybe I overlooked this somewhere on dconf.org, but just out of
> curiosity, about how many attendees did the whole conference have?

60.

Andrei

On 5/9/13, Nick Sabalausky <SeeWebsiteToContactMe@semitwist.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 09 May 2013 10:26:46 -0400
> Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail@erdani.org> wrote:
>
>> On 5/9/13 10:26 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> > With all this focus on technicalities, we forgot to discuss the gist of it: what did you guys think of the talk?

I liked the talk very much, although I preferred the 2007 talk where both of you presented the talk together and allowed questions to be asked during the presentation. Still I'm looking forward to the other more technical presentations.

P.S. it seems the #dconf hashtag is being hijacked by another conference now: https://twitter.com/GetApp/status/332770427296419841

On Thursday, 9 May 2013 at 21:32:19 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On Thu, 09 May 2013 10:26:46 -0400
> Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail@erdani.org> wrote:
>
>> On 5/9/13 10:26 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> > With all this focus on technicalities, we forgot to discuss the
>> > gist of it: what did you guys think of the talk?
>> >
>> 
>> That should better go in the digitalmars.D group though...
>> 
>
> Very good talk! And good production quality, too. This would be a
> great thing to point people towards to introduce them to D.
>

First good talk. Some tweaking can be done to make it better.

One of them is the plane metaphor. I now know that Walter is a big fan of plane (and he knows quite a lot about that !) but the problem is that the point is very subjective (the plane want to fly).

I'm sure the plane idea can be kept, but must be presented in a more factual/less subjective manner.

I'll go through the talk once again if I find time to do it and get more details.

10-May-2013 01:32, Nick Sabalausky пишет:
> On Thu, 09 May 2013 10:26:46 -0400
> Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail@erdani.org> wrote:
>
>> On 5/9/13 10:26 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>> With all this focus on technicalities, we forgot to discuss the
>>> gist of it: what did you guys think of the talk?
>>>
>>
>> That should better go in the digitalmars.D group though...
>>
>
> Very good talk! And good production quality, too. This would be a
> great thing to point people towards to introduce them to D.
>

Indeed and I can actually hear questions :)
BTW these were quite interesting in their own right like "if there is a way to cleanly manipulate carry bit within the language".

> And Walter does a good job on stage. *Never* comes across as
> pretentious, or cocky or full-of-...various things...like *cough*a
> certain former Apple leader*cough* always did. (Minor nit: Forgot to
> mention Mono-D on the last question, though.)
>

I loved the warm informal atmosphere here, too bad I've been stuck with visa approval at the last moment. The idea to smuggle myself in some crate of rice doesn't seem half-bad now ;)


-- 
Dmitry Olshansky

On Thu, May 09, 2013 at 05:32:18PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On Thu, 09 May 2013 10:26:46 -0400
> Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail@erdani.org> wrote:
> 
> > On 5/9/13 10:26 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> > > With all this focus on technicalities, we forgot to discuss the gist of it: what did you guys think of the talk?
> > >
> > 
> > That should better go in the digitalmars.D group though...
> > 
> 
> Very good talk! And good production quality, too. This would be a great thing to point people towards to introduce them to D.

+1. I listened to the talk yesterday... it was awesome! Can't wait for the other videos to be put up.

One tiny nitpick, though. In the example about sorting lines in a file, there was a syntax error in the code (missing '.' and the end of the first/second line). I know, I know ... but it was distracting me from what Walter was saying, my brain keeps going "but there's a syntax error! Is he going to talk about the syntax error? It's a syntax error!..." :-P


[...]
> I love the D-like line on the first slide. Kind of a strange API being used ;), but quintessentially D syntax. Cute :) The "100 lines of boilerplate" bit was great too. Made me cheer even though no one else was around.
[...]

Yeah, pretty much sums up how I feel about IDEs. But OTOH, the question at the end from the professor/lecturer proves that the majority of today's coders expect IDEs. I would vote for better education, but you can't deny the need for IDEs to at least smooth the transition from other languages.

In any case, I totally agree that if a language *needs* an IDE in order to cope with the amount of required boilerplate, then something is clearly very, very wrong at a fundamental level. I guess that's why I'm a D fan. :)


T

-- 
Food and laptops don't mix.

On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 01:09:32PM +0200, deadalnix wrote: [...]
> First good talk. Some tweaking can be done to make it better.
> 
> One of them is the plane metaphor. I now know that Walter is a big
> fan of plane (and he knows quite a lot about that !) but the problem
> is that the point is very subjective (the plane want to fly).
> 
> I'm sure the plane idea can be kept, but must be presented in a more factual/less subjective manner.

But the thing is, what constitutes "good code" *is* a subjective matter. How do you define "good code"? Mathematically speaking, anything that maps input into output correctly is equivalent, so a beautifully-written piece-of-art code is no better, by this definition, than an IOCCC entry that does exactly the same thing. But we'd never regard an IOCCC entry as "beautiful code" by any stretch of the term (even if you were the author -- I was, once, and it's exactly how Walter describes it: yes it works, yes there were quite a few ingenious hacks in it, and yes it got me the dubious honor of my code being featured on ioccc.org, but afterwards I really just wanted to hide it away somewhere, sweep it under the rug, etc.).

It's even more subjective when it comes to language design. Mathematically speaking, the most beautiful language is the most concise and expressive (and hence the most powerful). By that standard, we should be programming with Lambda calculus -- after all, every computation can be expressed by Lambda calculus, so why clutter the language with redundant constructs? But clearly that's not what we're doing here. The thing is, we're trying to map our human mental concepts onto programming space in the nicest possible ways (rather than taking a purely objective, mathematical approach, i.e., Lambda calculus or Turing machines), and mental concepts, by definition, are subjective.


T

-- 
Be in denial for long enough, and one day you'll deny yourself of things you wish you hadn't.

Am 10.05.2013 12:15, schrieb Andrej Mitrovic:
> On 5/9/13, Nick Sabalausky <SeeWebsiteToContactMe@semitwist.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, 09 May 2013 10:26:46 -0400
>> Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail@erdani.org> wrote:
>>
>>> On 5/9/13 10:26 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>>> With all this focus on technicalities, we forgot to discuss the
>>>> gist of it: what did you guys think of the talk?
>
> I liked the talk very much, although I preferred the 2007 talk where
> both of you presented the talk together and allowed questions to be
> asked during the presentation. Still I'm looking forward to the other
> more technical presentations.
>
> P.S. it seems the #dconf hashtag is being hijacked by another conference now:
> https://twitter.com/GetApp/status/332770427296419841
>

I found that presentation the other day by accident. Quite interesting.

--
Paulo

Am 10.05.2013 16:29, schrieb H. S. Teoh:
> Yeah, pretty much sums up how I feel about IDEs. But OTOH, the question
> at the end from the professor/lecturer proves that the majority of
> today's coders expect IDEs. I would vote for better education, but you
> can't deny the need for IDEs to at least smooth the transition from
> other languages.

I grew up with IDEs, the first being Turbo Pascal 3.0 foloowed by quite many variations, including Smalltalk and Lisp environments.

Then I got my first contact with UNIX in 1994 with Xenix, followed by DG/UX. It was a shock! It felt to me as if I was still in 1970 using the original UNIX.


>
> In any case, I totally agree that if a language *needs* an IDE in order
> to cope with the amount of required boilerplate, then something is
> clearly very, very wrong at a fundamental level. I guess that's why I'm
> a D fan. :)
>
>
> T
>

I think the same of any language that needs any form of tooling to make it better. For example, C requires lint+MISRA C to give the language the safety I get out of the box with D, Extended Pascal, Modula-2, Ada and similar.

--
Paulo