Dear Wolfgang, Thanks for celebrating the day. I am more the person who forgets his wedding anniversary and I would have missed this occasion as well.
I vividly remember our daily discussions about structuring classes, which sometimes could take hours. Meanwhile, the office where this took place does not exist anymore. On the next day, you had implemented our plan and we had to discuss again because some things did not work the way we had thought. This way we iterated towards a structure that managed to live for 25 years. I remember how we fought about the ordering of vertices in quadrilaterals and how we later had to go through the painful process of re-engineering this part in order to eliminate specializations with respect to dimensions. As for the ordering of arguments, it was a standard in C to have return arguments first. In C++ it is even rationally justified, since a return argument in last position makes it impossible to have a consistent ordering with optional arguments. Dear all, I would also like to make use of this day to announce my retirement from the deal.II developer team. It was a great time and I enjoyed the development very much. I have taught courses on deal.II on three continents and enjoyed being its ambassador. Scientifically, I have moved on towards hardware oriented implementations where we need much more specialized software. Personally, my career has shifted towards academic administration and my job as dean does not leave much time for programming anyway. I am happy that I am one of the fathers of deal.II, a child with a surprisingly small number of mothers, and I have spent considerable time and effort for it “in my time”. Now, is the time, where another generation should take over and also get full credit for it. My advice to you is: be fearless and not too respectful for the ancient, change what you deem necessary to meet modern needs. But, do remember that people are using deal.II and stick to the policy of changing the API carefully and with sufficient warning time, since this has been a trademark for deal.II for a long time and contributed to its success. I wish you all another 25 years of happy and successful development, Guido -- Prof. Dr. Guido Kanschat Dean of Engineering Sciences Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing (IWR) Heidelberg University -- The deal.II project is located at http://www.dealii.org/ For mailing list/forum options, see https://groups.google.com/d/forum/dealii?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "deal.II User Group" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/dealii/4472f8a6-c58b-46f4-a4c5-f10f00a92db9n%40googlegroups.com.
