A summary of D's design principles

[Walter Bright]

Juanjo Alvarez wrote:
> Anyway you can't ignore D's productivity. As a newcomer after one week 
> learning and toying with D my productivity is about 70% of the one I 
> have with Python after 8 years doing Python, and higher than the one 
> I've with Java or C++.
> I've found that the compiler error messages are usually very 
> informative,  which helps, but being able to link with C libs is a boost 
> too, compared to Python or Java where you need to write lot more than 
> declarations.
> Yesterday I translated some Python code (Quixote's scgi.py) to D in a 
> couple hours and now it runs like five times faster (before any 
> optimization or D-ization) using 10% of the.memory.  The translation was 
> almost direct, line by line which speaks a lot about D's expresivity (I 
> only missed something like list.remove(item)).

It's a great case history, thanks for posting this.

The problem with touting D's productivity, though, is that unless a new way can 
be found to tout it, it will be ineffective. This is because everyone touts 
their language as "more productive". People just see "more productive" and their 
brain just skips over it without it even entering their conscious thought.