[OT] Things I like about Andrei

[Carl Vogel via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 3 June 2016 at 02:17:51 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> A lot of us, myself included, have been very critical of Andrei 
> lately but I want to list of the excellent work he has done 
> over the years:
>
> First, early D was very different to D of today. Andrei changed 
> that, for the better. He's a genius of innovation with 
> templates and good at getting to the bottom of generic code.
>
> The Range concept is excellent, the logical extension of 
> iterators like slices are to pointers, and std.algorithm is 
> generally brilliant.
>
> Many of the patterns we take for granted in D, from templates 
> in general to conversion and literals on top of them, to ranges 
> and algorithms, were principally designed and implemented by 
> Andrei.
>
> std.experimental.allocator is very well done and the Design by 
> Introspection is not just smart insight to the generic 
> programming problem, but actually explored and explained in 
> such a way that we can hook onto it.
>
> His talks and writing are amusing and informative, and his 
> dedication unquestionable.
>
> Andrei Alexandrescu is a very good, innovative programmer and 
> writer who invents and explains things that others can't even 
> consider.
>
> We're lucky to have him with us!

I bought TDPL on sale whim a year ago, without any real interest 
in using D--just curious what it's deal was. And I think I 
devoured the whole thing in two evenings. It's one of the best 
books about a programming language I've read. I learned a lot 
from it---not just about D, but about language design and 
programming as well. And it's just funny as hell.

Between the book and his talks, he's a great representative for 
the language.

Like many folks, I only use D for hobby projects, and I could 
drop it at any time. I find the things that keep me excited about 
it are things I've read or heard from Andrei.