Dlings first release

[Andrew]

On Monday, 23 January 2023 at 10:21:04 UTC, João Lourenço wrote:
> I started working on this project a while ago. It all began 
> with a discussion between me and a coworker. From time to time 
> I announce D at work. I also tried to push some of my coworkers 
> to try it, but haven't had much success, perhaps I'm just a 
> terrible salesman. One of them seems to understand the appeal 
> of the language, however, doesn't have a reason to start 
> messing with it. So, in one of my recent discussions with him I 
> asked "If D had a similar project to Rustlings [1] would you 
> give it a try?", and the answer was yes because although he is 
> curious about the language, he thinks he needs a reason to 
> start messing around with it. Randomly messing around is not 
> his thing, and using it in a project could feel 
> counter-productive because of the time spent learning the 
> language instead of actively working on it. A project similar 
> to Rustlings would, on the other hand, be quick enough to get 
> going. Just start solving simple exercises to get a feel of the 
> language and what the features are. He could stop at any time 
> and come back whenever he feels like to keep progressing 
> without feeling forced to do it.
>
> So, I started working on Dlings [2]. My approach was to have it 
> as close as possible to Rustlings. They created a working 
> recipe, why not just follow it? So, right now, this is a clone 
> of Rustlings. There are a bunch of things that need to be 
> polished, but I felt it was good enough to release it and start 
> adding exercises.
>
> This is where I would like the community to come in. There are 
> a lot of experienced people in the D community, more 
> knowledgeable than I, more creative, and with experience in 
> education. I would like, if anyone is interested, to ask you to 
> give your opinions of how the exercises should be structured, 
> the topics to teach, how could they look, etc. Contributors in 
> general would be great! There is another project - dingbats [3] 
> - from monkeyyy, that has some topics and ideas laid out if you 
> want to check it out.
>
> [1] https://github.com/rust-lang/rustlings
> [2] https://github.com/iK4tsu/dlings
> [3] https://github.com/crazymonkyyy/dingbats

This looks like a good start, and I'm excited that the community 
as a whole is finally starting to orient itself towards 
beginners, since that's where most of the hype comes from, 
initially.

I'll see if I can help with formatting and documenting the 
existing code, because I believe that even the utility code that 
makes up the program should be very friendly and explanatory.

Hopefully with enough effort, this project could be adopted by 
the dlang community and added to dlang.org.