Hi there!

I'm Bryan St. Amour, a *nix lover since my undergrad days in Computer Science. I've been happily using Slackware Linux for the past 10 or so years, but in the past I've dabbled with various BSD's, Debian, and for a brief time ran Arch, back when it still had an installer of sorts. I got my *nix start with my university's Solaris cluster.

Programming-wise, I'm a C++ enthusiast (currently sitting on the ISO committee as part of the Canadian delegation), but I'm comfortable writing in C, perl, various shell and scripting languages, etc. I used to be a functional programming zealot, but those days are long gone.

I'm glad to have accidentally stumbled upon this place, as it seems like a nice community. Looking forward to interacting with you all!

Regards,
Bryan

Welcome to nixers.
It's super cool that you're part of the ISO committee of C++.

Hi there!

Out of interest, what made you give up on functional programming? Does the days of being a zealot mean you don't care for it at all, or you've just given up lauding it and forcing it on people?

(14-03-2020, 02:20 PM)twee Wrote: Hi there!

Out of interest, what made you give up on functional programming? Does the days of being a zealot mean you don't care for it at all, or you've just given up lauding it and forcing it on people?

Hey! No, I still love it, and I try to use functional idioms when they make my code cleaner and simpler, but when I was younger, it was Haskell or the highway for me. Nowadays I'm a bit more tame.

(14-03-2020, 12:01 PM)venam Wrote: Welcome to nixers.
It's super cool that you're part of the ISO committee of C++.

Thanks :-)

(14-03-2020, 04:59 PM)bstamour Wrote: when I was younger, it was Haskell or the highway for me.

I get you. I mostly use procedural languages but tend to write code in a more functional way.

I had a brief stint with Ocaml, and am still trying to play more with Erlang (I just don't do enough stuff where I feel it'd be useful), but never got into Haskell proper because it felt too slow.

I think all programmers could benefit from spending some time with functional programming. As you say, its ideas do help me design code that is simpler and cleaner.

But the only language I'm zealous about is C. ;-) As a minimalist at heart, I object to the overhead imposed by Haskell and many other languages.

I did never try Slackware...

You might be pushing me toward using it. :)

At first (before trying it) I did hate C++.

Then, after trying C++, I did hate it more because it was very badly used at the school I was (in my pretentious opinion of that time).

And then again, I got that C++ provides complex tools that you can end-up mastering to provide great APIs on top of regular, non-convoluted simple source code, which gladly help organizing complex projects, by stating things out rather than letting them implicit (and letting the programmer remember all the state he wants for its code).

By seeing clean C++ and ugly C at times, I got that the way to use the tool was more influent than the tool itself.

How is C++ evolving these days ? With systems still sticking to the oldest versions like OpenBSD and those pushing forward and all the platforms that pop out (embedded, etc...) it might be quite a puzzle !

C++ is devolving. People use either .NET or Rust these days. Sad enough.