Necessities for Adoption of D

[Jesse Phillips]

On Sun, 10 Feb 2008 08:26:42 +0900, Tyro[a.c.edwards] wrote:

> Hans W. Uhlig さんは書きました:
>> Good morning everyone,
>>     I am new to the D forums but I have been following D's progress for
>> a good while.
>> 
>> 2) A single standard library for most tasks - The whole Phobos here and
>> Tango there and DWT someplace else makes picking up a language
>> difficult. Not only that but as a Java Instructor I can simply point to
>> the Sun java & javax library sets available and say here is something
>> that can do that. In Suns case it may not do it well but its there.
>> 
>> 
> I boggles the hell out of me every time someone comes and complains that
> there are more than one standard library. I have never had that problem
> and I can attest to you that my programming experience pales in
> comparison to anyone on this newsgroup. There has only ever been one
> standard library. Tango and its predecessor "Mango" was created because
> patches submitted to Phobos were not readily implemented. But instead of
> sitting around and complain about it, people actually took a positive
> step to address the situation. It grew into what it is today because the
> creators believe in what they are doing and continue to develop their
> product. Of course, a good following (aka user base) is always a morale
> booster. But if I recall correctly, the Tango Team has never claimed
> that they are the standard and Walter has never endorsed it as the
> "Other Standard". Don't get me wrong, it is a damn good library and
> could easily become the standard. But as I sit here typing this message
> it is most definitely not a standard.
> 
> This is plain asinine. Most, if not all complaints of this sort claim
> that new users are hampered because the website is badly designed, there
> are two standard libraries, there is no IDE, debugging support is
> nonexistent or under par and the list goes on and on. As a novice
> programmer, I’m here to tell you that these claims do not apply to
> people who really want to learn the language. I really doesn’t even
> require you to understand what you are doing to learn this language.
> I’ve ported the Mersenne Twister on two separate occasions (both
> original and SIMD versions) to D, and while I learned a little more
> about D in the process of doing so, I still do not understand a whole
> lot about programming. The amazing thing about this is that I learned
> and did it all without any documentation other than the D website, the
> source code, and asking a few questions here and there. My debugger was
> me, my IDE was first notepad then I upgraded to UltraEdit because the
> job paid for it. I used the only standard library D has: Phobos.
> 
> I've been able to do in D what I still cannot do in C++ which has only
> one "STANDARD LIBRARY" and thousands of volumes of books dedicated to
> explaining its every intricate detail. I've spent in excess of $5000
> dollars to learn C++ and still cannot do in it what I can do in D on
> which I've spent $0. Sorry, make that $10 since I did buy "Learn to
> Tango with D". The language is not that difficult to learn especially if
> you are a novice and have no preconceived ideas about what programming
> should be. For those who come across with preconceived ideas, the site
> provides enough to explain differences between D and C, D and C++, D and
> JAVA and so on… To me, that is all you should require if you are an
> experienced programmer.
> 
> Yes, bells and whistles can make easier. But is that truly a
> showstopper? I don’t think so.
> 
> Regards,
> Andrew

Your right, if someone wants to learn D they will. The problem is that we 
have to convince people that they want to learn the language. This my not 
sound to hard because of D's simplicity and power compared to its 
competition.

The conflicts and things that are missing will drive people away, or it 
give them something to point at to explain why they don't want to spend 
time learning it. These people are looking at D and are saying, "I have 
all these tools in my language, and know what I am doing." Then you have 
the new programmers that aren't set in their ways. The problem here is 
that one company is hiring D coders.