Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
I strongly believe Walter got the STL and generic programming in general. He might be fuzzy about some minor details, but he is plenty good at plenty other things and always had a good listening ear for the importance of genericity.
To be fair, it took me many years to get it. STL's brilliance was nearly completely obscured by the syntax of it, and I was thoroughly misled by that.
Bartosz Milewski once gave a fantastic talk where he showed some type metaprogramming in Haskell. I don't know Haskell, but the examples were one liners and easily understood. Then he showed the equivalent using C++ template metaprogramming, and it was many lines of complex syntax. Then, the brilliant part was he highlighted the Haskell bits that were embedded in the C++ template syntax. It was one of those "ahaa!" moments where suddenly it made sense.
Third, ranges were "in the air" already at the time I formalized them. Boost and Adobe had notions of "range", even though all their primitives were to expose begin() and end(), so they were essentially lackeys of the STL iterator abstraction. People were talking about "range" whenever they discussed two iterators delimiting a portion of a container. It was only a matter of time until someone said, hey, let's make range a first-class abstraction.
In the early days of D, we talked about using arrays as the basis for the "D Template Library" rather than pointers. I can't find the thread about it, though.
