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.