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digitalmars.D - Ben Gertzfield is our 11th mentor

reply Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail erdani.org> writes:
Hello,


Ben Gertzfield, my Facebook coworker, is our 11th mentor for this year's 
GSoC. Please join me in welcoming Ben.

Although this year we only have three formal mentor slots, I decided to 
approve Ben for two reasons. First, more mentors means a stronger GSoC 
presence overall and more competent opinions and ideas on the mentors 
list, and Ben is definitely one to listen to.

Second, I believe Ben has what it takes to be a great mentor because he 
knows a lot about a lot, knows how to explain, and enjoys teaching. He 
has helped me in a variety of situations ranging from fixing my cell 
phone to debugging my VMWare virtual machine. Ben also added support for 
the D programming language to Facebook's build system and is overall 
interested in the evolution of the language.

We haven't decided who the three formal mentors will be for our slots, 
but I'm sure Ben's participation will add good value to our GSoC presence.


Andrei
Apr 18 2011
next sibling parent =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Ali_=C7ehreli?= <acehreli yahoo.com> writes:
On 04/18/2011 12:55 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:

 Hello,


 Ben Gertzfield, my Facebook coworker, is our 11th mentor for this year's
 GSoC. Please join me in welcoming Ben.

 Although this year we only have three formal mentor slots, I decided to
 approve Ben for two reasons. First, more mentors means a stronger GSoC
 presence overall and more competent opinions and ideas on the mentors
 list, and Ben is definitely one to listen to.

 Second, I believe Ben has what it takes to be a great mentor because he
 knows a lot about a lot, knows how to explain, and enjoys teaching. He
 has helped me in a variety of situations ranging from fixing my cell
 phone to debugging my VMWare virtual machine. Ben also added support for
 the D programming language to Facebook's build system and is overall
 interested in the evolution of the language.

 We haven't decided who the three formal mentors will be for our slots,
 but I'm sure Ben's participation will add good value to our GSoC presence.


 Andrei


Congratulations Ben!

I worked with Ben previously at PayPal and VMware. Andrei is not 
exaggerating. :)

Ali
Apr 18 2011
prev sibling next sibling parent reply "Eric Poggel (JoeCoder)" <dnewsgroup2 yage3d.net> writes:
On 4/18/2011 3:55 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:

 Ben also added support for the D programming language to Facebook's
 build system and is overall interested in the evolution of the language.


Are you allowed to comment on how Facebook is using D?  It would be very 
interesting to know.
Apr 18 2011
parent reply bearophile <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> writes:
Eric Poggel (JoeCoder):


 Are you allowed to comment on how Facebook is using D?  It would be very 
 interesting to know.


It seems D at Facebook is becoming a bit like Go at Google :-)

Both firms use several languages (Google uses Python, a quite restricted C++,
Java, JavaScript, Sawzall, a bit of Go, not-languages as Protocol Buffers,
etc), both need to process very large amounts of data in reasonable time
frames, and probably both firms feel the need of a language that's almost as
fast as C++ (and C) but less bug-prone, simpler and able to lead to faster
development, and apparently for them Java is not fit enough for this purpose
(maybe for the Java lack of manual control of memory layout of data structures,
that leads to higher heap memory usage and less performance in some cases).

Bye,
bearophile
Apr 18 2011
parent reply jasonw <user webmails.org> writes:
bearophile Wrote:


 Eric Poggel (JoeCoder):
 

 Are you allowed to comment on how Facebook is using D?  It would be very 
 interesting to know.


 
 It seems D at Facebook is becoming a bit like Go at Google :-)
 
 Both firms use several languages (Google uses Python, a quite restricted C++,
Java, JavaScript, Sawzall, a bit of Go, not-languages as Protocol Buffers,
etc), both need to process very large amounts of data in reasonable time
frames, and probably both firms feel the need of a language that's almost as
fast as C++ (and C) but less bug-prone, simpler and able to lead to faster
development, and apparently for them Java is not fit enough for this purpose
(maybe for the Java lack of manual control of memory layout of data structures,
that leads to higher heap memory usage and less performance in some cases).
 
 Bye,
 bearophile


D isn't tainted by any big "political" organization yet. For example Go is
Google's, JVM stuff is dictated by Oracle, .NET stuff by Microsoft, Obj-C by
Apple. I believe Facebook needs its own language and using D as this kind of
political platform is a way to fight the other giant corporations.

Facebook also needs an incompatible language to improve their vendor lock-in
later in coming markets. For example the rumored Facebook phone. It would be
benefical for them to use some totally incompatible language to prevent code
from leaking to other platforms, most notably Android and iOS. It would be
benefical for D to be used as this kind of weapon because Facebook would pay
the community and Walter a lot. D standard lib would also be incompatible with
C libraries in other systems. I think it's a worthy goal, why should we pretend
otherwise? No successful platform is politically neutral. Thoughts?
Apr 18 2011
parent reply Daniel Gibson <metalcaedes gmail.com> writes:
Am 19.04.2011 02:40, schrieb jasonw:

 bearophile Wrote:
 

 Eric Poggel (JoeCoder):


 Are you allowed to comment on how Facebook is using D?  It would be very 
 interesting to know.


 It seems D at Facebook is becoming a bit like Go at Google :-)

 Both firms use several languages (Google uses Python, a quite restricted C++,
Java, JavaScript, Sawzall, a bit of Go, not-languages as Protocol Buffers,
etc), both need to process very large amounts of data in reasonable time
frames, and probably both firms feel the need of a language that's almost as
fast as C++ (and C) but less bug-prone, simpler and able to lead to faster
development, and apparently for them Java is not fit enough for this purpose
(maybe for the Java lack of manual control of memory layout of data structures,
that leads to higher heap memory usage and less performance in some cases).

 Bye,
 bearophile


 
 D isn't tainted by any big "political" organization yet. For example Go is
Google's, JVM stuff is dictated by Oracle, .NET stuff by Microsoft, Obj-C by
Apple. I believe Facebook needs its own language and using D as this kind of
political platform is a way to fight the other giant corporations.


We don't even know yet if D is really used much within Facebook and what
it is used for.


 
 Facebook also needs an incompatible language to improve their vendor lock-in
later in coming markets. For example the rumored Facebook phone. It would be
benefical for them to use some totally incompatible language to prevent code
from leaking to other platforms, most notably Android and iOS. It would be
benefical for D to be used as this kind of weapon because Facebook would pay
the community and Walter a lot. D standard lib would also be incompatible with
C libraries in other systems. I think it's a worthy goal, why should we pretend
otherwise? No successful platform is politically neutral. Thoughts?


I totally disagree :)

Facebook has Open Sourced a lot of their technology (e.g. Thrift, Hive,
HipHop) - so I don't think they're heading for a vendor lock-in with
their technology or want "their own" language.
Furthermore I don't think a Facebook-phone using a programming language
totally incompatible to iOS and Android would succeed. iOS and Android
is to big to have totally incompatible competition (for smartphones) -
that competition will just fail. As an app-developer you don't want to
develop totally seperate versions for each platform.
(Right now, especially for games, you can develop most stuff in C and
then call that C-Code from Objective-C or Java/Dalvik, as far as I know)
I'd love to see the possibility to develop in D for smartphones in
general (esp. iOS and Android, maybe Windows Phone if anybody will ever
use it), though. But that'd require a port of a compiler and runtime to
ARM (and the specific operating systems, of course).

I rather think Facebook would use D for internal stuff that needs high
performance - stuff that they'd previously would have done in C++.
That Andrei wants Thrift bindings for D kind of suggests this ;)

It'd be great if Facebook used D and write articles about it. It'd get
us a lot attention. However I'm not sure if that is good as long as
Phobos is in it's current state - important stuff will be rewritten
(streams, XML support), so I don't think D2 is ready for a lot of public
attention yet.

I'd really hate to see D become a weapon of some corporation.
It's really great if corporations use it and support it, but D should
stay independent and neutral.
In the end, if that corporation goes out of business, D would die as
well. Do you think anybody would care about Objective-C without Apple?
Or about Java, if it had been limited to Suns products?
What about successful languages like C(++) or Python? I think they were
and still are pretty neutral (even though at least C and C++ were
developed at a commercial company).

So no, it's not a worthy goal to become Facebooks (or anybody elses)
weapon (and nothing suggests they want that) and I personally would stop
using D if something like that happened.

(Hope that all makes sense, it's kind of late ;-))

Cheers,
- Daniel


PS: Welcome, Ben :-)
Apr 18 2011
parent reply "Eric Poggel (JoeCoder)" <dnewsgroup2 yage3d.net> writes:
On 4/18/2011 9:20 PM, Daniel Gibson wrote:


 What about successful languages like C(++) or Python? I think they were
 and still are pretty neutral (even though at least C and C++ were
 developed at a commercial company).


C++ is horrid but fast.  Python is beautiful but slow.  D is the best of 
both, or at least moving in that direction.


 So no, it's not a worthy goal to become Facebooks (or anybody elses)
 weapon (and nothing suggests they want that) and I personally would stop
 using D if something like that happened.


I don't understand how Facebook using it "as a weapon" could impair the 
freedoms we already enjoy with D.  AFAIK, everything except the back-end 
of one of the three compilers is open source and redistributable.
Apr 18 2011
parent Daniel Gibson <metalcaedes gmail.com> writes:
Am 19.04.2011 06:09, schrieb Eric Poggel (JoeCoder):

 On 4/18/2011 9:20 PM, Daniel Gibson wrote:
 

 What about successful languages like C(++) or Python? I think they were
 and still are pretty neutral (even though at least C and C++ were
 developed at a commercial company).


 
 C++ is horrid but fast.  Python is beautiful but slow.  D is the best of
 both, or at least moving in that direction.


Yeah my point was that languages can be successful without being
political, disproving Jasons "No successful platform is politically
neutral."


 

 So no, it's not a worthy goal to become Facebooks (or anybody elses)
 weapon (and nothing suggests they want that) and I personally would stop
 using D if something like that happened.


 
 I don't understand how Facebook using it "as a weapon" could impair the
 freedoms we already enjoy with D.  AFAIK, everything except the back-end
 of one of the three compilers is open source and redistributable.
 


Look at how Oracle is using Java as a weapon..
And probably the development of D would be focused on their goals and
everything else would be neglected (like for example Oracle neglects
Java for game development). And even though the front end currently is
Open Source that could  be changed for future versions.

But this discussion is quite pointless, nothing suggests that Facebook
plans to use D or any other technology as a weapon or for vendor
lock-ins - in the contrary, they made some great Open Source
contributions in the past. And nothing suggests that Walter is
interested in something like this.

Cheers,
- Daniel
Apr 19 2011
prev sibling parent Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:
On 4/18/2011 12:55 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:

 Ben Gertzfield, my Facebook coworker, is our 11th mentor for this year's GSoC.
 Please join me in welcoming Ben.


Welcome, Ben!
Apr 18 2011