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.