The Strange Loop conference

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

I'm back from the Strange Loop conference. It's been an interesting 
experience. The audience was very diverse, with interest in everything 
functional (you'd only need to say "Haskell" or "monad" to get positive 
aahs), Web/cloud/tablet stuff, concurrent and distributed systems. 
Mentioning C++ non-mockingly was all but a faux pas; languages like 
Scala, Haskell, Clojure, and Erlang got attention. The quality of talks 
has been very variable, and unfortunately the 
over-confident-but-clueless-speaker stereotype was well represented.

I gave a talk there 
(https://thestrangeloop.com/sessions/generic-programming-galore-using-d) 
which has enjoyed moderate audience and success. I uploaded the slides 
at http://erdani.com/d/generic-programming-galore.pdf and the video may 
be available soon.

There was a very strong interest in D's CTFE abilities, which we should 
consider a strategic direction going forward. Also finalizing D's 
concurrency language and library infrastructure is essential. These two 
features are key differentiators. Also, capitalizing on D's functional 
features (which are e.g. better than Scala's but less known) would add 
good value.


Thanks,

Andrei