I mentioned a little while back that I planned to start a D Community Conversations series on the Foundation's YouTube channel. In this series, I'll chat in depth with various people from the D community about their their projects, their programming backgrounds, their influences, how they got started with D, etc.
I've just published the first episode here:
I had a nice chat with Walter starting with the earliest influences that set him on the path to becoming a compiler writer, and exploring how his life experiences influenced the design of D. As always, he throws in a number of anecdotes, many of which I'd never heard before.
The inspiration and reference for this discussion is 'Origins of the D Programming Language', the paper that Walter, Andrei, and I wrote for the HOPL IV conference. We carried the talk up to the early work he did on D. We'll pick up there for Part 2 in future episode, where we'll talk more specifically about the design decisions behind, and the evolution of, D1.
Thanks to Walter for sitting down to do this with me. We actually had to do it twice, as I botched the recording of our first session last week. I enjoyed both chats, and I'm looking forward to the next one.
I'll plan to do one of these every other month, so I'll be reaching out to people around the D community as time goes on.