It's official: One-day D tutorial at the ACCU Conference 2010 in Oxford, England

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Hello everybody,


I just received firm confirmation from Giovanni Asproni, the chair of
the ACCU 2010 conference, that a special one-day tutorial on the D
programming language featuring Walter Bright and myself is being
planned. The ACCU announcement will follow shortly.

http://accu.org/index.php/conferences

ACCU is one of my favorite conferences. The atmosphere is casual, the
talks are strong, the people are friendly, and the Brits can throw a
heck of a party. For an US resident, the cost (registration + airfare +
hotel) may be quite high but there's a lot you get in return. I
convinced Walter to come last year and he hasn't regretted one bit.
Besides, if you get to deliver one or more talks, the conference
organizers cover the registration, all or most of the airfare, and part
of the hotel costs for you. (That depends on some factors such as the
length and number of talks.)

Today's the last day of submissions, and of course the day I submitted
my proposals, but Giovanni took the time to discuss the D tutorial with
me and wrote (I quote):

"I'm willing to consider also late submissions...maybe you can encourage
some D geeks ;-)"

So, get on to it! If you have something to say, it shouldn't take more
than one hour now to put together an abstract. Twenty minutes may be a
closer estimate. Building the slides will take much longer but you'll
have a few months to do so. All you need to do right now is to write a
couple of paragraphs about the topic you consider you have something to
share about. For transparency and possible inspiration, I paste my own
submission at the end of this message.

If you don't plan to make a submission, I still urge you to attend.
Again, it's a good conference that you may find fun and inspirational.


Andrei

--

P.S. My submission is below.


1. Super Size Me

* Type: tutorial
* Duration: 90 min
* Speaker name: Andrei Alexandrescu
* Speaker biography: at the end of this message
* Description:

Working with very large data sets, only a few years ago the monopoly of
a few companies (such as Google, Walmart, Yahoo, or Morgan Stanley), is
becoming increasingly commonplace. Dealing with massive quantities of
data on parallel computational networks shifts usual design tradeoffs
substantially: operations that are traditionally considered cheap become
prohibitive, and algorithms that seem ungainly become life savers.
Andrei shares from his experience on working on large data sets with his
doctoral work and six months of doing Natural Language Processing
research for Faceboook.

2. The Title of This Talk has been Trademarked

* Type: tutorial
* Duration: 90 min
* Speaker name: Andrei Alexandrescu
* Speaker biography: at the end of this message
* Description:

Contract Programming (also known by a name that cannot be mentioned due
to trademark issues) is an organic programming and testing methodology
that has received increasing attention in the recent years. However, to
the programming community at large, quite a few aspects of contracts are
still fuzzy. It is often unclear what exactly must fall under the
incidence of a contract versus plain old checking; how contracts could
and should interact with the theoretical complexity and the practical
efficiency of a function; or how contracts interact with open recursion,
inheritance, the Non-Virtual Interface idiom, interface definition,
interface implementation, and implementations that override more than
one interface functions. This talk discusses such subtler aspects of
Contract Programming.

====================

* Speaker biography:

Andrei Alexandrescu coined the colloquial term "modern C++", used today
to describe a collection of important C++ styles and idioms. His
eponymous book on the topic, Modern C++ Design: Generic Programming and
Design Patterns Applied (Addison-Wesley, 2001), revolutionized C++
programming and produced a lasting influence not only on subsequent work
on C++, but also on other languages and systems. With Herb Sutter,
Andrei is also the coauthor of C++ Coding Standards: 101 Rules,
Guidelines, and Best Practices (Addison-Wesley, 2004). Through Andrei’s
varied work on libraries and applications, as well as his research in
machine learning and natural language processing, he has garnered a
solid reputation in both industrial and academic circles. Since 2006, he
has been second-in-command to Walter Bright, the D programming language
inventor and initial implementer. Andrei has been the key designer of
many important features of D and has authored a large part of D's
standard library, positioning him to write an authoritative book on the
new language, appropriately entitled, The D Programming Language. Andrei
holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington and a
BS in Electrical Engineering from University "Politehnica" Bucharest. He
works as a Research Scientist for Facebook.