Also Iain B was there (who maintains the GDC compiler) and he mentioned that he was more from a devops background than a developer background and found it interesting to see how people were using the compiler.

Thanks all who came from further away for making it :)

On Wednesday, 4 February 2015 at 12:53:45 UTC, Kingsley wrote:
Thanks to everyone who attended it was a great evening of D fun :)

As part of the evening we did a secret santa code challenge - here are some of the results:

http://www.meetup.com/London-D-Programmers/messages/boards/thread/48694585

We had about 13 people from different backgrounds - many from C/C++ as well as Java, F# and dynamic languages such as Python. Many of the guys had a financial / banking background or an academic background - for example we had some guys working on market data, another guy who ran a hedge fun as well as people from scientific / research and university backgrounds.

We touched on IDE's and editors for D - I demo'd my intellij plugin. Bruno was also there (he maintains the eclipse D plugin DDT) and he had some interesting things to say about where he thought the future of IDE's is going especially in terms of code completion. In my intellij plugin I actually re-use the guts of the DDT parser/lexer and the general opinion seemed to be that have a single set of tools that could be re-used in multiple IDE projects was a good way forward. I already implemented Brian's DCD and DScanner tools in my plugin and Bruno was looking to go that way also rather than re-writing the wheel each time. Brian certainly has some great tools in D for this kind of thing. (Hackerpilot - DCD/libdparse/DScanner etc)

We also had some discussion about the popularity of D - and many felt that D was a great language especially coming from C/C++ but that the whole community was perhaps a little fragmented and finding information on the Dlang site was also a bit disjointed and that in order for a language to gain popularity it needed the appropriate community support and information - the recent language Rust was mentioned as having great documentation/support for new people and is arguably doing a better job at that aspect than D especially since its such a new language compared to D.

There was also a bit of discussion around the dub package manager with Russel W feeling strongly that dub was more like a java maven and had many issues for what he wanted to do. I think he has since posted something on the D forum about his dub feelings. We got onto dub from my intellij plugin which uses dub by default.

We got together in pairs with 1 more experienced D person and 1 newbie / less experienced D persons and paired on the secret santa challenge. We only had about 45 mins for this one and then some discussion on how we chose to implement things.

A couple of issues came out of the challenge regarding familiarity with syntax and then spending time hunting down the docs - is there a forall in D? Also one of the guys ended up with an out of data d compiler and spend a lot of time trying to get the right version instead of the one that came with the IDE he downloaded.

The slides for the evening are here:
http://slides.com/kingsleyhendrickse/london-d-programmers

Our kind host Skills Matter are organising a Functional Programming conference in the summer and they have suggested we add a D talk to it that focuses on the functional aspects of D.

I'll be arranging meetups every 6 weeks or so.

Hope to see you all at the next one  :)



On Sunday, 1 February 2015 at 17:33:48 UTC, Kingsley wrote:
Hi

Just a reminder that the first London D Programmers meet up is happening on Tuesday February 3rd at Skills Matter. Looking forward to seeing you there :)

http://www.meetup.com/London-D-Programmers/

--Kingsley

On Tuesday, 23 December 2014 at 18:26:52 UTC, Kingsley wrote:
Hi,

I've created this meetup group for any London based D enthusiasts to meet up and get excited about D.

I'll also demo my intellij plugin for D at the first meetup which I've scheduled for February. Although I might be a bit lonely if I'm the only person there! lol.

http://www.meetup.com/London-D-Programmers/

Please join me if you are in the area and feel like getting some D.

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