Vision document for H1 2018

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Monday, March 12, 2018 03:31:36 Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d-announce 
wrote:
> If Phobos looks like a mess to C# programmers, so much the worse
> for C# programmers.  However I doubt they this is true in the
> general case.  It's better in many ways, but different and
> unfamiliar and everything unfamiliar is disconcerting in the
> beginning.

Yeah, I remember when I was first dealing with D years ago, and the range
stuff that was in there was totally unfamiliar, and it annoyed me, because I
just wanted the iterators that I was familiar with so that I could easily do
what I wanted to do. Granted, it was worse to figure all of that out then,
since the documentation was much worse (e.g. at the time, there was a
compiler bug that made it so that auto return functions did not show up in
the documentation, so all of std.algorithm explicitly listed the return
types, making it downright scary), but still, at the time, I just didn't
want to deal with figuring out the unfamiliar concept, so it annoyed me.
Now, I actually understand ranges and am very glad that they're there, but
as a D newbie, they were annoying, because they were unfamiliar. I think
that I'd approach it all very differently now, since at the time, I was in
college and just generally a far less experienced programmer, but I think
that many of us tend to look for what we expect when learning a new language
or library, and when that's not what we get, it can be disconcerting to
begin with.

Phobos is very unique in its approach with ranges, likely making it a major
learning experience for anyone from any language, but AFAIK, the only
language with a comparable approach in its standard library is C++, and I'd
definitely expect it to be somewhat alien to the average C# or Java
programmer - at least to begin with. D does things differently, so anyone
learning it is just going to have to expect to deal with a learning curve.
How steep a curve that is is going to depend on the programmer's experience
and background, but it's going to be there regardless.

- Jonathan M Davis