London D Programmers MeetUp

Wed Feb 4 04:53:43 PST 2015

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.