Andrei Alexandrescu
Andrei Alexandrescu used to be a rocker. Andrei Alexandrescu used to be a sky diver. Andrei Alexandrescu was a Wall Street consultant. Today, Andrei, a Romanian IT expert working in the field of natural language processing in the United States, is the author of a best-selling programming book and is holding conferences around the world.
Reporter: Many in the computing community speak of you as a guru of C++ programming. How would Andrei Alexandrescu recommend himself before a Romanian empty-pocket pensioner carrying his bag from the market, who knows nothing of computing?
Andrei Alexandrescu: 'Dear madam, dear sir, I am a man like you, with goods and bads, I was just lucky to be born in other times.' I believe that the generation of our parents was a sacrificial one. I still feel sorrow when I think what my parents went through to raise their children.
It is a huge pity that pensioners in Romania are living a life of misery. They have endured the communist gulag, and are now enduring the indifference of new capitalism. They received the worst from everything.
In the nineties, I used to hear that some of the elderly have a nostalgia for communism and I thought of them badly. Slowly I learned that things are not that simple.People had structured their lives in a specific style and found themselves that the whole structure disappeared from beneath their feet. It's devastating.
I read that convicts freed after 20 years want to go back to prison where life has a meaning fro them and don't like it in the outer world, which they find chaotic.
Rocker, sky diver, scientist
Reporter: Your biography looks more like one of an adventurer than of a computing expert. You were the member of a rock band, a parachutist in the Romanian army and a Wall Street consultant. Are there any c
