EXE? Anyone every written a D program I can execute?

[John Reimer]

On Thu, 01 Mar 2007 21:03:08 -0500, Jarrett Billingsley wrote:

> "gerryscat" <gerryscat at hotmail.com> wrote in message 
> news:es78lq$aj9$1 at digitalmars.com...
>> I've been poking around, sure I see sample code, even a GUI library, 
>> great. Now, where is a program, written in D for Windows, that I can 
>> download and **run**? The proof is in the pudding (whatever that means).
>>
>> thanks
> 
> Oh come now, any old programming language can produce an executable file. 
> You could write functionally equivalent programs in pretty much any 
> language, but the real question is: which language do you want to program it 
> in?
> 
> Are programmers really going to care what the EXE looks like?  No.  Are 
> availiable EXE files a good indicator of the ability of a language? 
> Absolutely not.  All EXEs are are a measure of how many people are using the 
> language  (Which admittedly is still small with D.  But you have to start 
> somewhere!).


I have to agree with the above.  It's the clear truth.  

But I imagine the need to "see" the binary stems from the same sort of
psychological factor on which advertising/marketing preys.  It's
neither logical nor objective.  But it's very powerful.  

This is one reason D will struggle to have any influence on the majority of
users as long as it's main marketing is based on language qualities and
comparisons: few, beyond language techies, will harken based on D's
features and improvements alone. That's why libraries and applications are
sometimes the single most important publicity piece (think Ruby on Rails). 

Only later do people start to realize the importance of some language
features. Even then, most of the features are largely unnecessary or
non-critical from the actual project's perspective; people may just grow
fond of them for individual reasons.

-JJR