The birth of Åkerön

Tyro[17] ridimz at yahoo.com
Tue Jun 18 18:47:37 PDT 2013


On 6/18/13 6:09 PM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I understand that Andrew Edwards declined to have his talk recorded, and the
> slides have not been uploaded either.  So, what was it actually about?  The
> abstract is ... not exactly informative. :-P
>
> Thanks & best wishes,
>
>      -- Joe
>

I decided not to record my talk which, in hindsight may not have been my 
best decision. That shouldn't have prevented the release of the slides 
but after reviewing the slides I came to the conclusion that the message 
was lost without the actual talk so I also decided against releasing them.

Steven did a great job explaining the gist of the talk (thanks) but I'll 
expand a little:

I've been in the military and D Programming communities for quite some 
time and during the presentation I tried to convey to the audience the 
situations that lead to me joining both; basically frustration that led 
to as search for better. When I stumbled across D I was just cutting my 
teeth on source code and in many ways I still am. While I have a grasp 
of the basics, I am at a lost when it comes to stringing them together 
to develop a system of any kind. Most of what I know I've learned 
lurking around the D forums and trying to read D out of Java and C++ 
programming books. Since I've resisted actually trying to learn those 
languages however, I haven't learned too much.

Though I cannot program, I have tried to support the community in every 
way I possibly can. Spreading the word was something simple so I tried 
to do that whenever and wherever I got the opportunity. I attempted to 
talk to a number of authors to have them look into the language and 
write books about it but got very few. Those that I did receive were not 
very positive. With the exception of two authors who, while they could 
not assist, began to make mention of the language in their newsletters 
and articles: one even went on to teach one of his courses using D (a 
big thank you to Chuck Allison who continues to be a fervent supporter 
of the language even today).

There are a couple observations that have remained constant over the 
past eleven years I've been lurking here in D land: 1) The documentation 
is seriously lacking 2) There are few tutorials (and those that exist 
suffer from code rot) 3) The language continues to evolve so people are 
unwilling to develop tools for it 4) Most projects that get started are 
quickly abandoned 5) People outside the community do not give it a fare 
shake 6) There is no IDE 7) No built in GUI library 8) Most people 
complain about what's not available instead of lending a hand to fix it.

One would think that after eleven years, I would have mastered the 
language by now. Not so because my day job doesn't allow for it. I start 
early in the days (up by 4AM) and end late at night (depart work about 
9PM) so the little time is get to pursue programming is next to 
nonexistent and very precious. Needless to say, when I do find that 
time, I would like to pick up a book written about programming in D 
rather than trying to translate, in my head, books written for other 
languages to D. No books? Maybe some tutorials would help... wait, they 
don't exist either.

I'm not going to be like the people that fall under category 8. To me 
it's one of two simple choices, either I contribute or shut up. At this 
point though, I am tired of just shutting up and waiting for the 
condition to change. Since I'm about to transition to civilian life, 
what would be better than trying to help ensure the future of something 
I care deeply about? I took a look at the list and decided that there 
were only to places I can help out: I could help create tutorials (in a 
severely limited capacity) and continue spreading the word about the 
benefits of switching to D.

I have no problem with spreading the word and, in fact, have been doing 
it since I stumbled upon the language. But I want to do more. I want to 
code and actually help improve the language. In order for that to happen 
though I need situations 1 or 2 to be improved. So I decided to launch 
dtutor.org.

But the decision was the easy part. I won't be finished with my current 
job until summer 2014 so I have very little time. I have very little 
programming experience, and thus would be at a lost to try to prepare 
content by myself. Though I've assembled, repaired and trouble shot 
computers issues for 20+ years, I've never ran a server before so that 
presents a challenge in itself. The technology I've decided to use to 
build the site is written in Python (of which I know nothing) which 
presents quite an obstacle to get it ported to D. I've never design or 
participate in the design of a website before so will have to learn that.

Yeah, its pretty clear that I have bitten off a lot more than I can 
chew... but to me it is better than complaining about the situation and 
not doing anything to help. The rest of the talk was about other areas 
of interest I have including Natural Language Processing and Logistics 
Management Systems. In the big scheme of things they are significant for 
my future business goals but not so much for D. Though I do hope to be 
the proud employer of D programmers in the future.

My hope is that I can obtain some help in bringing dtutor.org to life so 
that people like me can have a resource to turn to when they need 
guidance and the nay-Sayers will have one less thing to talk about.

-- 

Andrew Edwards
--------------------
http://www.akeron.co
auto getAddress() {
     string location = "@", period = ".";
     return ("info" ~ location ~ "afidem" ~ period ~ "org");
}


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