Introducing Myself

[Travis Boucher]

I guess I should introduce myself.

Hi, I'm Travis, and I am a code-a-holic and general purpose unix geek.

I heard about D a long time ago, but never took a good look at it.  A 
few weeks ago a friend of mine suggested I look at D when I was brushing 
up on some more advanced uses of C++ (I was mostly brushing up on STL 
and template usage in general).

I love studying different programming languages, semantics, syntax and 
implementation.  I also love some of the different paradigms, and seeing 
how they work.

Now I am not some coding expert, I wouldn't even call myself a good 
programmer.  I can get stuff done when I need, but its usually messy, 
ugly, "works for me", "code is meant to be run, not read (ie. PERL)" 
sort of crap.

The one thing that frustrates me about the direction of programming in 
general is how high level and bloated it is getting, and how alot of 
programmers I have come across are fine with that.  Abstraction upon 
abstraction upon abstraction, turning something as simple as 1 + 1 into 
an operation that goes through layers upon layers of code until the 
machine finally says "2", then back up the abstraction chain until you 
get a value that may or may not be 2.  Turning a 1 tick operation of 2-4 
bytes into a 100+ tick operation of 100+ bytes.  (ok, I may be 
exaggerating a bit on the numbers but you get the point).

Don't get me wrong, I love a language that allows me to make 1 + 1 = 3 
if I want it to, but I don't think it should require massive amounts of 
memory or CPU time to do it.

In comes D.

D lets me code like I am coding in a scripting language, but executes 
like I am coding in C/C++.  It has taken the best parts of all languages 
and put them into one pretty package.  Ok, the implementations are still 
less mature then I'd like, but they are getting better.  The language 
lets me ignore issues I don't care about (like memory management), and 
moves out of the way on issues I do care about (like memory management).

I could go on forever on what I love about D, conditional compiling, 
delegates, templates (especially the syntax), but most people on this 
newsgroup probably feel the same.

Anyway, since I don't have that many geek friends capable of 
understanding the merits of D, or sharing my excitement of new features 
I learn to use, I turn to this newsgroup.

A little about me (thats what an introduction is for anyway, isn't it?)

I have mostly worked on systems administration tasks.  Programming is 
more of a hobby that has applied uses in systems administration.

The past few years I've focused mostly on large scale web clustering, 
both high transaction and high throughput.

Recently I started teaching myself a bit about the 3d world world (no, 
that double world is not a typo).  Learned Blender (and Python by 
association).  Been poking around 3D engines for a few years including 
Ogre and Irrlicht.

Have done a bit with embedded stuff, including micro controllers (just 
AMR, and mostly in emulators as my hands as not steady enough anymore to 
do much electronics, too much caffine) and nintendo DS (devkitpro).

I use open source software almost exclusively.  I have a couple windows 
boxes around just to keep myself up to date on the new stuff microsoft 
is doing.  I don't do OSX, but I'd love to.

I use Linux (mostly ubuntu these days, but started with Slackware back 
in the 2.0 kernel days), and BSDs (mostly FreeBSD, but OpenBSD and 
NetBSD a bit as well).  I like different architectures, and trying to 
get a unix of some sort running on them (I have MIPS, ARM, Alpha, Sparc, 
x86, and x86_64 machines in one form or another).

I love learning new things, and D is the most exciting thing I have 
gotten into the past 5 years.  I hope to become part of the community in 
some way or another.