I wrote A starting guide for Newbies

[James Miller]

> I wish I had this when I begun. My first usage of D implyed a compilation of
> ldc, then gdc (the only one that worked at the time on my plateform) and
> patching phobos by myself (reminder, it was the first time I used that
> language, not to mention it was pretty harsh and I think most people would
> have quit at this point). It was few years ago, and thing got better since.
>
> But I'm convienced that D isn't accesible enough for beginers. So this
> document is very welcome !

I agree, D is not that accessible to beginners, partially due to the
rapidly changing nature of the language and technology. I found it
difficult to start when every library I encountered was broken, either
because it hadn't been ported to D2, or used libraries that were
broken for some reason.

Hopefully once the language and compiler specs settle down a lot more,
we can start work on making things easier overall. I for one would
love to see a clang-style autocompleter for D, compiler packages for
the major OSes/distributions that work with 99% of the D code out
there, some sort of simple project-finder so we can find libraries
easily, etc, etc.

Also, more documentation, not the kind of documentation we have now,
which is really good, but requires a certain amount of knowledge to
start with, but closer to "Learn how to program, with D". Personally I
think D would be a brilliant language to teach with, it has decent OO,
is compile-time checked, has pointers, but you often don't need them,
templates that can be used like Java/C# generics but also allow for
more complex constructs. You can start out with "this is a variable"
go through "these are pointers" and end with "this is
meta-programming".