London D Programmers MeetUp

Wed Feb 4 04:58:27 PST 2015

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.