Since there're many new faces around here, I thought maybe we could run the introductions again. (This already happened about 2 years ago: http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/11799.html). You can add other things if you want to.

Name: Carlos Andrés Santander Bernal
Age: 22
Location: Quito, Ecuador
Background:
I'm a computer sciences/software engineering/computers engineering student (the formal title is systems engineering, but the focus is on everything, from programming to databases to networking to ... we're supposed to be ready to be db administrators, network administrators, project leaders, and we shouldn't aim to being programmers. Cool, ah?), currently doing my thesis and working half-time in a software development company.
I started programming in GW-Basic when I was 8 or something like that. Years later I moved to QBasic and the VB6 (all that just for fun). Then it was university time, so I learned bits of C, C++ (not really, just Turbo C++ 3), Java, Delphi, Lisp, Prolog, HTML, C#, T-SQL, JavaScript, JSP, and others that I don't remember. When I was taking Compilers, I wanted to write my own (still waiting) so searching for open source compilers I ran into D. That was almost 3 years ago.
What I've done in D:
I've started a lot of things, but have finished few. Recently I was playing with the DMDScript source and posted my results. I think I was successful at what I wanted. I also started the Apollo library, which is supposed to be a GUI library built over the Borland VCL using Delphi 6. However, my (never ending) lack of time hasn't allowed me to go any further, and I don't think there's much interest on it because the Delphi 6 Personal Edition (the one I have) doesn't allow to use it for commercial applications. Besides that, a couple of uni projects, but mainly personal thingies.

So, anybody else?

_______________________
Carlos Santander Bernal

Name: Clay Smith
Age: 19
Location: Pennsylvania, United States
Background:
   Taught myself C with "C Primer Plus" using a c++ compiler. I always wanted to make a game, I was a computer game addict for a time, in some ways still am.
   My friends all happened to be into computers, and introduced me to linux, which was nice. Me and my friends attempted to make a 3D wargame our high school year, (warcoders.sf.net).. but things went sour with my stupid school admins afraid of us "hacking" the network, the plug was pulled :-/
   Around some time I started my own personal project (claytek.sf.net), and being the only one, as the size of the project grew, it took longer and longer to make even the slightest changes to the structure of code.
   I read a slashdot article about D, and decided to give it a shot. I learned D is a very nice and easy transition from C++, and the tool dmake is absolutely awesome, plus DMD compiler speed is incredible.
   I converted my project to D, and it sits at dsource.org ('claytek'). My time is all consumed by college now :-/
   I'm a freshman majoring in comp sci. The next programming book I am very excited about owning is the official D programming book!

Carlos Santander B. wrote:
> Since there're many new faces around here, I thought maybe we could run the introductions again. (This already happened about 2 years ago: http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/11799.html). You can add other things if you want to.
> 
> Name: Carlos Andrés Santander Bernal
> Age: 22
> Location: Quito, Ecuador
> Background:
> I'm a computer sciences/software engineering/computers engineering student (the formal title is systems engineering, but the focus is on everything, from programming to databases to networking to ... we're supposed to be ready to be db administrators, network administrators, project leaders, and we shouldn't aim to being programmers. Cool, ah?), currently doing my thesis and working half-time in a software development company.
> I started programming in GW-Basic when I was 8 or something like that. Years later I moved to QBasic and the VB6 (all that just for fun). Then it was university time, so I learned bits of C, C++ (not really, just Turbo C++ 3), Java, Delphi, Lisp, Prolog, HTML, C#, T-SQL, JavaScript, JSP, and others that I don't remember. When I was taking Compilers, I wanted to write my own (still waiting) so searching for open source compilers I ran into D. That was almost 3 years ago.
> What I've done in D:
> I've started a lot of things, but have finished few. Recently I was playing with the DMDScript source and posted my results. I think I was successful at what I wanted. I also started the Apollo library, which is supposed to be a GUI library built over the Borland VCL using Delphi 6. However, my (never ending) lack of time hasn't allowed me to go any further, and I don't think there's much interest on it because the Delphi 6 Personal Edition (the one I have) doesn't allow to use it for commercial applications. Besides that, a couple of uni projects, but mainly personal thingies.
> 
> So, anybody else?
> 
> _______________________
> Carlos Santander Bernal

"Carlos Santander B." <csantander619@gmail.com> wrote in message news:ctufra$12vt$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> Since there're many new faces around here, I thought maybe we could run the introductions again.

www.walterbright.com

Name: Christopher Grant Sauls
Age: 23
Location: Owensboro, KY, USA
Background:
Taught myself BASIC/1a on an old TRS-80 Model 4P, later took a high school
course on C.  Later learned Java2 (also self-taught), and stuck with those two
for quite a while -- aside from learning some specialty and scripting languages,
like XML, PHP, etc.  Ran across D a couple years ago, and have pretty well loved
it from first sight.

What I've done in D:
I've either started or am involved in the following:
-- Sinbad -- A port of the OGRE 3D engine... currently in a re-thinking phase.
-- Mango -- a kick-arse library, which I helped debug a bit in its early stages,
and still use.
-- Cashew -- some general add-ons for Mango; currently strictly for my own
personal use, but I might make something distributable later, like a minimal XML
parser, a D source parser, that kinda thing.
-- NeoMOO -- a new MOO server, based on Xerox PARC's LambdaMOO, still in alpha.
-- NeoConv -- a utility to convert LambdaMOO database files into NeoMOO world
directories.
-- ABCD -- my friend's project to write a BitTorrent client, based on the ABC
client written in Python, hence the name.
-- JRView -- a little utility for a friend, basically read a playlist from a
website and made it available from his system tray.
-- "Otakutron" -- working name for a game engine I'm helping the same friend
work on, basically for making Japanese-style 2D "A/H-games".
-- Yam -- Yet-Another-Mud, a threaded multi-user server which is built by
glueing together Mango and DMDScript... still in planning stages.

-- Chris Sauls

Name: Niall FitzGibbon
Age: 23
Background:
Unemployed at the moment. I didn't study computers in any official capacity at school or university, so I'm trying to break into the industry the hard way I guess. I started programming in BASIC on an old Atari 400 when I was 9, though it took me a while since I was given the computer and didn't have any manuals ;) Later went on to QBasic when I got my first PC -- I guess that a lot of people did this in the early 90s, and there must have been thousands of "super duper" versions of gorilla and nibbles around. Finally started learning C when I was about 14, but didn't really get good at it until I got online at university and was able to work with other people on projects and learn from them. At the moment, I'm working mainly in C++ as lead programmer on a Half-Life 2 mod project: http://www.fortress-forever.com.

What I've done in D:
Not much, yet. I've started several things. First, a conversion of my tree-based data structure from C++ to D -- the C++ version will be used to hold game configuration data in Fortress Forever.

Second, I'm working on a genetic programming library in D. It has a simple ASM-style program syntax with user-defined opcodes/functions and variable number of arguments for each one. Won't be finished for ages, since all my efforts are concentrated on my game project right now.

In the near future, I'm considering the possibility of using D to create the anti-cheat software that will be included with Fortress Forever. Anti-cheat software is rather a tricky issue because the client machine is essentially untrusted (especially if they're actively trying to cheat ;)) and so it is one area where obfuscation and regular updating are more important than things like encryption strength. For this reason, I'm considering writing it in D because most disassemblers (particularly IDA Pro, which almost all cheat creators use) do not yet have library signatures and accurate program flow analysis for D -- and D's new inbuilt structures such as associative arrays and so on will hopefully confuse the hell out of any reverse engineers. If I actually go ahead with this anti-cheat software in D, then I'll hopefully be able to release some low-level libraries that other people can use, such as ones for function detouring, PE loading, memory pattern matching, etc..

In article <ctufra$12vt$1@digitaldaemon.com>, Carlos Santander B. says...
>
>Since there're many new faces around here, I thought maybe we could run the introductions again. (This already happened about 2 years ago: http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/11799.html). You can add other things if you want to.

I can't find my introduction in that archive so here's the short form:
Name: Ben Hinkle
Age: 35
Location: Boston, MA
Background: Born and raised in beautiful Ithaca, NY. Dual undergrad degree in
Math/CS from Cornell. PhD in dynamical system from SUNY Stony Brook. Worked on
the MacMath programs from Springer-Verlag. Worked for ~2 years at Waterloo Maple
in Waterloo Canada as a developer for Mac platform support and with the graphics
group. Currently at The MathWorks as a developer in the graphics group for
MATLAB. I've been interested in D for a couple of years now and have written a
wrapper around the GMP library, a container library (MinTL) and helped port
(with Mike Swieton) Doug Lea's concurrent Java library. Oh yeah - I also jumbled
together the d-mode support for emacs (though my emacs lisp is so bad it gets
many things wrong). Now I'm poking around with MinWin.

Name: Michael David Parker
Age: 33
Location: Seoul, Korea
Background:
The first program I ever learned to write:

10 ? "Mike"
20 GOTO 10

Or something like that (can't recall if it used quotes or not). I was quite young, somewhere between 8 and 10 I think. I knew from that moment that I wanted to be a programmer. Circumstances led me away from that path for quite some time. I came to Korea in 1991 with the US Army, extended my tour of duty twice because I liked it so much, and then picked up an English teaching job in 1994 as soon as my enlistment was over. I finally turned back to coding in 1998 when I came out of the nightclubs long enough to buy a computer.

My primary focus was C and Java, though I couldn't avoid C++ (as much as I wanted to). I've also picked up the usual suspects in scripting (Python, Perl, PHP, JS, etc...). In the last few years I've managed to land some contract work (mostly J2EE stuff) through some of my English students. The most visible project being a J2EE backend for the first iteration of this website 2 years ago (though apparently our original work has been scrapped since, along with the original employees) : http://www.dreamcasting.co.kr/.

I am infatuated with game programming, and have spent nearly every second of the last few years learning everything I can. I've knocked out a handful of old skool clones in C (Asteroids, Pong, PacMan and such) and moved on to 3D, AI, Audio, Networking, the whole shebang. For the past year I've been gradually moving toward the goal of starting my own Independent game company to produce downloadable games. This has involved evaluating several language and library/engine combinations (Java & LWJGL/JOGL, C/C++ & Torque, OGRE, ODE, SDL, and a gazillion others). It was my quest for 'something different' that led me to D. It helps that my current teaching schedule only requires me to work 11 hrs/week :)

What I've done in D:

The only major thing I've done in D is to start the Derelict project at DSource.org. For those who don't know, it's a collection of bindings to C libraries that are useful for multimedia apps (read games). The difference between Derelict and the other bindings out there is that Derelict loads shared libraries manually via std.loader rather than by requiring that the app link to an import library. Derelict currently contains bindings for:

OpenGL
GLU
OpenAL
SDL
SDL_image
SDL_mixer
SDL_ttf

SDL_net and GLFW are next on the hit list, as soon as I get around to them. I spent some time wrestling with Python bindings, but gave up for the time being. Eventually, I hope to add several more bindings to the project.

I'm also toying around with some game-related ideas in D. Some of what results from them I might release on DSource under another project. I'm still torn on exactly which way to go for my game programming, but D is looking better and better every day :)

Name: Daan Oosterveld
Age: 24
Location: the Netherlands
I started of on a Sinclair ZX81 programming Basic. Wasn't much fun because the computer overheated within 30 minutes, just when I was able to type in a program. And bam!, a whole spectrum of 4096 colors on my Amiga 500. I programmed some basic in Amos but because you can't to anything funky with basic on a 3Mhz computer I had to do something faster. So I learned 68k Assembler from scratch to make use of the Blitter and Copper coproccesors. (I still know the register adresses ;) ).
When PCs became fast enough (300Mhz+) to do something usefull I stared programming applications: E (funky little language discussed earlier) as a first step to OOP, C, C++. Then I said goodbye to my rusty 25Mhz Amiga 4000/030. Finaly a PC could match the visual performance.
I use REBOL for fast procedural, Java, PHP for webdev, Ruby for OOP scripting, Objective-C or C++ for applications. Mostly on linux, because it's a proper development environment.

I had my share of programming languages. I know the pittfalls and which languages is best suited for some problems. D is a good replacement for C++ and Objective-C, the primary languages I develop with. But there are still some features missing and I intent to fill the void ;)

I'll be using D for programming Animation/video/3D/XML/XSLT, etc. Anything related with media.

Currently I am a studing for my bachelor in Arts & Technology.

Name: David L. 'SpottedTiger' Davis
Age: 48 (gee! I don't feel this old)
Location: Pennsylvania, United States

Background:
Born in an age before Personal Computers, I was one of the first in my family to
buy PCs when they became more affordable like the TI-99/4A 16-bit cpu 16Kb
(found out later that it was slower than an 8-bit computer), Vic-20 8-bit cpu
32Kb (8Kb + 24Kb expanded memory card), C64 6508 1Mhz 8-bit cpu with 64Kb (48Kb
direct with 16Kb bank switched between the ROM and RAM) and then finally I got a
real PC...a IBM XT 10Mhz Intel-8086 8/16-bit cpu with 1Mb memory (640Kb base,
384Kb with a EMS driver) and had MS-DOS v4.02 as the OS which had amber and
black screen that used a Hercules graphic card. And have since been using MS-DOS
/ Windows v3.xx, Win95, Win98, Win98 SE, WinME, and finally moved to NT leaving
the DOS world behind forever with WinXP (which I feel is the very best version
of Windows I've ever used).

Spented 11 1/2 years in the U.S. Army, the first four as a Infantry foot soldier (MOS 11B) hopping out of helicopters to foot it the rest of the way to the detestations, a TOW (MOS 11H) driver/anti-tank gunner on a jeep in South Korea, and finally to the Mechanized Infantry using M118 Tracks as a TOW driver/anti-tank gunner to support M60 tanks. The latter part of my Army service I worked has a Computer Operator (MOS 74D) on IBM 360/370/4341 mainframes, in which I ran jobs that order equipment and supplies need by other Army units…and made the rank of Sergeant (E-5).

Have programmed in Basic (TI-99/A Basic, Vic-20 MS Basic, C64 MS Basic, C64
Comal, IBM BasicA, MS GW-Basic, MS QBasic v4.5, Borland Turbo Basic v1.0 now
called PowerBasic, and MS Visual Basic v1.0-6.0), Pascal (Borland’s Turbo
Pascal), Cobol (IBM mainframes), played a little with Forth and Logo, Fortran in
college, Assembly (on IBM mainframes, C64, and Intel PCs), C/C++ (mainly with
Borland’s compiler), and more than a year and a half ago discovered D with it’s
wonderful Basic / Turbo Pascal like strings build into the Language. Even though
Basic will always be my primary language, D quickly move into second place
pushing C into third…:P

Currently in D, I’ve created (some seven months ago) and activity maintain a “D
Programming Language” website (at
http://spottedtiger.tripod.com/D_Language/D_Main_XP.html) that mainly has
entry-level type code (in which I’ve written and converted thousands line of
code in D), some (hopefully) helpful D modules / projects and data /
information. Also I can’t wait to see D move to v1.0, and for the combined
talents of Walter and Matthew to publish the very first English-written D book
(but Japanese do get credit for writing the first D book…it’s just too bad none
of us can reading it…unless we speak Japanese of course).

Anyway, everyone, “Keep Truckin’ !!” and writing more code in D. :))

-------------------------------------------------------------------
"Dare to reach for the Stars...Dare to Dream, Build, and Achieve!"

"Niall FitzGibbon" <billdoor@gmail.com> wrote in message news:ctvm1r$27ik$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> In the near future, I'm considering the possibility of using D to create the anti-cheat software that will be included with Fortress Forever. Anti-cheat software is rather a tricky issue because the client machine is essentially untrusted (especially if they're actively trying to cheat ;)) and so it is one area where obfuscation and regular updating are more important than things like encryption strength. For this reason, I'm considering writing it in D because most disassemblers (particularly IDA Pro, which almost all cheat creators use) do not yet have library signatures and accurate program flow analysis for D -- and D's new inbuilt structures such as associative arrays and so on will hopefully confuse the hell out of any reverse engineers. If I actually go ahead with this anti-cheat software in D, then I'll hopefully be able to release some low-level libraries that other people can use, such as ones for function detouring, PE loading, memory pattern matching, etc..

LOL. Be sure and use a few nested functions, and maybe some foreach with opApply. That should confuse any reverse engineering program designed for the output of C or C++.