A look at the D programming language by Ferdynand Górski

[Rob T]

On Monday, 7 January 2013 at 22:21:59 UTC, Chris wrote:
> Another thing, IMO, is that there is an overemphasis on C++ vs. 
> D. Usually people have to choose between systems programming 
> (learn C/C++) or high level (learn Python, Ruby etc.). Most 
> non-programmers who need to write a piece of software opt for 
> Python and other scripting languages, because nobody wants to 
> learn C/C++ only to write a small parser for data files. With D 
> you no longer have to choose. You can write both quick and 
> dirty script-like stuff and stuff that is close to the machine. 
> Python and Ruby took off, I think, because they appealed to 
> people who are not fully fledged programmers but who want or 
> need to do some programming. This is the crowd the D community 
> has to get on board. Don't forget that this is what has made 
> JavaScript one of the most widely used languages (alas!).

A really important advantage that scripting languages provides 
that D does not currently provide, is direct runtime 
interpretation of the language. This is very important for the 
use cases of script languages such as Ruby and PHP, because often 
they are used for coding and testing on the fly, ie., used in an 
environment that requires frequent changes with almost instant 
feedback.

You can also embed a scripting language directly into other 
applications, and store "code" as data, which can be transmitted 
from one machine to another over the wire. We can store and 
transmit D code too, but getting it to automatically run on the 
other end is not so easy or convenient.

All of these things D, as a language, probably can do (although 
perhaps only as a subset of the full language), but the tools are 
simply not there yet.

A language such as C++ seems like a bad fit for a scripting 
language because of it's complexity and the difficultly with 
parsing through it. Also a scripted language probably should not 
have low level access that is provided by languages such as D and 
C/C++.

--rt