How convince computer teacher

[Austin Hastings]

On 12/9/2010 11:27 AM, Ddev wrote:
> hi community,
> How convince my teacher to go in D ?
> After talk with my teacher, i do not think D is good because after 10 years is not become the big one. she is very skeptical about D. If i could convince my teacher it will be great maybe i will teach to his
> students :)

Please don't.

D is a language with essentially zero base. Companies using D are few 
and far between. The vast majority of D projects are abandoned. Support 
for the tools is spotty, intermittent, and seems to depend to a large 
extent on politics and ego. Similarly, the amount of "churn" in the 
std.* namespace is pretty clear cause for concern.

Technically, there is very little new in D, and what appear to be 
planned features have not made much development progress. Learning D 
means that other related languages (Java, C++, C) would appear to have 
fewer features in terms of syntax, but will permit writing the same 
programs. It's a lot nicer to learn to program in Pascal and then 
discover C than it would be to learn to program in C and then be forced 
into Pascal.

 From an employment perspective, most managers don't know about D. They 
do know about C++ and Java. Having D on your resume is likely to be a 
net negative. (You have to unlearn D, and then learn C++ or Java, and no 
doubt you'll be whining about it the whole time.)

The place where D2 seems to offer value lies in metaprogramming, since 
it supports a friendlier syntax. But if you're doing any kind of survey 
course, it seems straightforward to move from Java to Functional to C++ 
metaprogramming, which should eliminate the difficulty.

I don't see where D has anything to offer a computer teacher. There 
isn't a convenient, trivially-installed IDE (Java, .NET). There isn't 
any corporate grant money (Java, .NET). There isn't any industry demand 
(Java, C++, .NET). There isn't any piece of amazing new technology that 
is only available in D (Java, Ruby, Assembly). There isn't an incredibly 
diverse collection of existing code freely available (Java, Perl). There 
isn't an enormous installed base (Java, .NET, Perl, C, C++, Cobol, Ada, 
Fortran, Ruby, Python). It isn't a dumbed down teaching language 
(Pascal, Java, Lisp).

Bottom line: you'd be wasting your time and your teacher's time. If 
you're still in school, you shouldn't be looking at D at all. You should 
be learning some of the functional languages to stretch your brain, or 
learning some of the popular procedural languages to pad your resume.

=Austin