The Joker is a card that doesn't really belong to the regular deck of cards. Another term would be "guest seminar". The point of such seminar is to invite a person who is working with another language than D and can explain how things works and are different from D. This can serve as inspiration for future D direction as well as encouragement to learn and investigate other languages. Any serious software engineer should really dwell into several programming languages.

It doesn't need to be a language but also a library that perhaps isn't available for D, among other things. Preferably it should be an outsider, so that the person isn't biased to much towards D.

This is similar to how I've seen Ali Çehreli do D seminars in a conference dedicated to C++. No one seems to mind and think that his seminar are interesting and also can give C++ programmers another perspective.

I was thinking, shouldn't we have a goal to have at least one joker seminar each Dconf?
Have Dconf invited outsiders before?
Do you think this is a good idea?

On Saturday, 16 October 2021 at 13:17:41 UTC, IGotD- wrote:

DConf 2017 had a keynote from Scott Meyers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WBaY61c9sE

On 10/16/21 9:17 AM, IGotD- wrote:

Aside from Scott Meyers (twice), we have had guest keynotes from Martin Odersky (Scala), and we were scheduled to have a keynote from Roberto Ierusalimschy (Lua) before Dconf 2020 was cancelled.

I find those talks very fun and informative.

-Steve

On Saturday, 16 October 2021 at 14:24:50 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:

Scott Meyers
2014: https://youtu.be/KAWA1DuvCnQ
2017: https://youtu.be/3WBaY61c9sE

Martin Odersky
2018: https://youtu.be/uiorT754IwA

Others have been invited in other years but declined. I was really happy we were able to get Roberto for 2020, and I'm still bummed that we had to cancel.