Beginner ?. Why does D suggest to learn java

[Paulo Pinto via Digitalmars-d-learn]

Am 17.10.2014 um 16:14 schrieb Jessica Rauth:
> On Friday, 17 October 2014 at 08:44:00 UTC, Paulo  Pinto wrote:
>> On Friday, 17 October 2014 at 01:05:37 UTC, ketmar via
>> Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
>>> On Fri, 17 Oct 2014 00:52:14 +0000
>>> MachineCode via Digitalmars-d-learn <digitalmars-d-learn at puremagic.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I don't understand. If at least it were C but java? why not D itself?
>>> C is *awful* as "beginner's language". never ever let people start with
>>> C if you don't hate 'em.
>>>
>>> as for D... current version of D can be used, but with some
>>> precautions. we now have excellent book by Ali. (it's great, really! i
>>> believe that it must be featured on the front dlang.org page!) but java
>>> has alot more books and tutorials.
>>>
>>> not that D is bad for beginners, it's just has a smaller userbase. and
>>> all that things with "classes are reference types and structs are not",
>>> "empty array is not empty array but is empty array" and so on D may be
>>> confusing a little. it's good to have some CS background to understood
>>> that things.
>>>
>>> just my cent and cent.
>>
>>
>> Better, go with FreePascal http://www.freepascal.org/ and discover all
>> that those features that many C advocates spread as being close to the
>> machine and other C only features, aren't exclusive of it.
>>
>> Alongside support for real modules, OO and genericity.
>>
>> Then with a head clean of bad C influences, jump into D.
>>
>>
>> --
>> Paulo
>
> One of the problem when starting out with FPC resides in the fact that's
> a completely different family of language (Ada, Pascal, Modula vs the C
> family), syntax and philosophy (for example in the RTL).
>
> Another one is that usually people use it in combination with Lazarus
> and as the RAD concept is no shit, people start building some
> applications very fastly. Then when they come to another lang. eg D or
> Cpp they take a big slap in the face. The fact is that Obj. Pascal and
> Delphi often give a wrong appreciation of its own skills and abilities.


Although I am biased to the Pascal family of languages, this has been 
done in real world for a couple of decades.

When I joined the New University of Lisbon as a student in 1994, I was 
lucky that the professor heading the programming languages section, had 
a similar opinion as me in terms of programming languages.

The first year students had introduction to programming with P2C/GNU 
Pascal in the first semester, followed by C++ with gcc in the second 
semester.

There was no C, at all. It was expected that any student compent enough 
to use C++, would be able to code in straight C if asked to do so.

On my last year at the university (1998/9), I one of the teachers giving 
those lab classes to students. By then, we were using Delphi and Visual 
C++ instead.

The students didn't had much problems switching languages.

They got to learn that using pointers doesn't need to be the dragon that 
C makes out to be.

That there was a way to deal with strings, arrays and reference 
parameters without impact in the whole application. The most curious got 
to learn how to disable bounds checking.

They learned how to write modular applications without having to prefix 
all their identifiers.

They also learned that C wasn't the only way to touch the machine at all 
levels.



>
> You talk about genericity but the genericity in Object Pascal is
> currently almost inexistant and doesn't provide a good idea of what
> "template-meta-programming" is. Actually this looks more like a patch to
> the lang. and some simple things just like casting a generic type or
> global generic functions simply don't work at all. While D2 has been
> written with this idea, FPC will never be good with TMP. Even in the
> commercial version (Delphi XE7) they start to add some kind of patchs eg
> with a compiler instrasic which is equivalent to D "static if" (which
> means that the lang. is not designed for that at all).


I just referenced it, because I saw it mentioned a few times in Delphi 
documentation, but never came to use it.

Since 2000 that I don't do anything in the Pascal world of languages, 
besides collecting Oberon related stuff.

--
Paulo