Why I'm hesitating to switch to D

[James Fisher]

On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 7:46 AM, Jacob Carlborg <doob at me.com> wrote:

> On 2011-06-28 23:09, Walter Bright wrote:
>
>> 5. I know I suck at web site design, which is why David Gileadi helped
>> us out by designing the d-programming-language.org look & feel.
>>
>
> I think it makes it hard when most of the pages are written in DDOC. It
> doesn't help to attract web designers.
>

I'd definitely agree with that.  I have no experience with DDOC, but TBH I
don't intend to ever have any.  As a general criticism of DDOC, it seems
like another reinvented wheel.  Semi-plaintext formats surround us like the
plague, and for every use case for documentation, there's a better option.
 If you want

   - simplicity, use Markdown <http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/>.
    Supported everywhere, like GH.
   - bulky extensible semantic documentation, use
DocBook<http://www.docbook.org/>.
    Used by O'Reilly, I'm told.  Presumably that's how Real World
Haskell<http://book.realworldhaskell.org/> is
   maintained as a slick website and an O'Reilly book.
   - readability, but power and extensibility if required, use
docutils<http://docutils.sourceforge.net/>
   /Sphinx <http://sphinx.pocoo.org/>.  Used for the Python standard library
   documentation <http://docs.python.org/py3k/>, which, as anyone who has
   used it knows, is The Best Documentation In The World.

That said, I suspect DDOC is now entrenched at least in the stdlib
documentation, so maybe we'll have to live with it.  However, the case
for using
it for the website<https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/d-programming-language.org/blob/master/index.dd>is
nonexistent (anyone disagree?).
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