Travis Boucher wrote:
I guess I should introduce myself.

Hi, I'm Travis, and I am a code-a-holic and general purpose unix geek.

I heard about D a long time ago, but never took a good look at it. A few weeks ago a friend of mine suggested I look at D when I was brushing up on some more advanced uses of C++ (I was mostly brushing up on STL and template usage in general).

I love studying different programming languages, semantics, syntax and implementation. I also love some of the different paradigms, and seeing how they work.

Now I am not some coding expert, I wouldn't even call myself a good programmer. I can get stuff done when I need, but its usually messy, ugly, "works for me", "code is meant to be run, not read (ie. PERL)" sort of crap.

The one thing that frustrates me about the direction of programming in general is how high level and bloated it is getting, and how alot of programmers I have come across are fine with that. Abstraction upon abstraction upon abstraction, turning something as simple as 1 + 1 into an operation that goes through layers upon layers of code until the machine finally says "2", then back up the abstraction chain until you get a value that may or may not be 2. Turning a 1 tick operation of 2-4 bytes into a 100+ tick operation of 100+ bytes. (ok, I may be exaggerating a bit on the numbers but you get the point).

Don't get me wrong, I love a language that allows me to make 1 + 1 = 3 if I want it to, but I don't think it should require massive amounts of memory or CPU time to do it.

In comes D.

D lets me code like I am coding in a scripting language, but executes like I am coding in C/C++. It has taken the best parts of all languages and put them into one pretty package. Ok, the implementations are still less mature then I'd like, but they are getting better. The language lets me ignore issues I don't care about (like memory management), and moves out of the way on issues I do care about (like memory management).

I could go on forever on what I love about D, conditional compiling, delegates, templates (especially the syntax), but most people on this newsgroup probably feel the same.

Anyway, since I don't have that many geek friends capable of understanding the merits of D, or sharing my excitement of new features I learn to use, I turn to this newsgroup.

A little about me (thats what an introduction is for anyway, isn't it?)

I have mostly worked on systems administration tasks. Programming is more of a hobby that has applied uses in systems administration.

The past few years I've focused mostly on large scale web clustering, both high transaction and high throughput.

Recently I started teaching myself a bit about the 3d world world (no, that double world is not a typo). Learned Blender (and Python by association). Been poking around 3D engines for a few years including Ogre and Irrlicht.

Have done a bit with embedded stuff, including micro controllers (just AMR, and mostly in emulators as my hands as not steady enough anymore to do much electronics, too much caffine) and nintendo DS (devkitpro).

I use open source software almost exclusively. I have a couple windows boxes around just to keep myself up to date on the new stuff microsoft is doing. I don't do OSX, but I'd love to.

I use Linux (mostly ubuntu these days, but started with Slackware back in the 2.0 kernel days), and BSDs (mostly FreeBSD, but OpenBSD and NetBSD a bit as well). I like different architectures, and trying to get a unix of some sort running on them (I have MIPS, ARM, Alpha, Sparc, x86, and x86_64 machines in one form or another).

I love learning new things, and D is the most exciting thing I have gotten into the past 5 years. I hope to become part of the community in some way or another.



Hello Travis,

Welcome aboard the D train.

Let's see...
dsource.org
planet.dsource.org
dsource.org/projects/descent
dsource.org/projects/dsss
http://wiki.team0xf.com/index.php?n=Tools.XfBuild
http://dsource.org/projects/ldc
http://dsource.org/projects/tango

Hope these links can make you more productive with D.

Good luck, other D friends are sure to give you advice as well.

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