D Community Conversations: Walter Bright on the Origins of D Part 1

[Mike Parker]

I mentioned a little while back that I planned to start a D 
Community Conversations series on the Foundation's YouTube 
channel. In this series, I'll chat in depth with various people 
from the D community about their their projects, their 
programming backgrounds, their influences, how they got started 
with D, etc.

I've just published the first episode here:

https://youtu.be/-kkMYJN3MnA

I had a nice chat with Walter starting with the earliest 
influences that set him on the path to becoming a compiler 
writer, and exploring how his life experiences influenced the 
design of D. As always, he throws in a number of anecdotes, many 
of which I'd never heard before.

The inspiration and reference for this discussion is 'Origins of 
the D Programming Language', [the paper that Walter, Andrei, and 
I wrote](https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3386323) for the HOPL 
IV conference. We carried the talk up to the early work he did on 
D. We'll pick up there for Part 2 in future episode, where we'll 
talk more specifically about the design decisions behind, and the 
evolution of, D1.

Thanks to Walter for sitting down to do this with me. We actually 
had to do it twice, as I botched the recording of our first 
session last week. I enjoyed both chats, and I'm looking forward 
to the next one.

I'll plan to do one of these every other month, so I'll be 
reaching out to people around the D community as time goes on.