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.
