Origins of the D Programming Language

[Adam D. Ruppe]

On Friday, 30 November 2018 at 23:12:57 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> By early history, I meant before 0.50.

Oh, I see, early by your reckoning :P

I don't remember exactly when I first saw D, though I do know I 
first used dmc in either later 2000 or early 2001, and remember 
seeing D some time later when I went to download dmc again. I 
think it was 2003ish.

My first thought was "looks like Java, I'll pass" lol. Of course, 
I reevaluated that decision by 2006 and you know where that led :)


So yeah to me, early history is anything before 2005, but I can 
see how it is different to you.

> A peculiar thing about my memory is I remember events and such, 
> but do not recall when those events happened, unless there is 
> some sort of anchor associated with it. In going through old 
> emails, logs, etc., to attach dates to memories I was surprised 
> at the actual order of things.

Yes, indeed. I keep referencing times based on which church 
missionaries are here. They change every other month, whereas the 
rest of my life is similar. So I frequently am like "oh I made 
that when Kim and Kate were here..." then that anchors it. 
Probably sounds silly to the outside world, but it works fairly 
well for me.

Similarly, the reason I remember the dmc usage was because I had 
to use the high school's internet at the time, so being in that 
location adds to the memory. I never realized how recently my 
usage of it was compared to when Digital Mars was started though! 
wow.

My 2006 note is just because I pulled out my old hard drive and 
checked the last modify dates on some of those .d files! Before I 
did that though, I could have sworn I didn't use D until 2007.


> Github is such an indispensable tool.

Lemme slightly correct you here: it is git that tracks this stuff 
and distributes the history to several third parties who can 
corroborate you.

Github, of course, helps coordinate with those other people, and 
their brand name surely helps in recognition, but I don't wanna 
give it too much credit because I do think it is important that 
we remember that it can be replaced... and probably will replace 
them someday. (They would have recently gone under if not bailed 
out by Microsoft!) Specific companies come and go, but the 
underlying methodology outlives that.

> (Just last month, having a registered copyright of the source 
> code to Empire from 1978 saved my bacon yet again.)

awesome. I haven't played Empire for years. Maybe I should break 
it out again... but last time, I disappeared for a few whole days 
;)