Why I'm hesitating to switch to D

[James Fisher]

On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 9:29 AM, Walter Bright
<newshound2 at digitalmars.com>wrote:

> On 6/28/2011 11:46 PM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>
>> I think it makes it hard when most of the pages are written in DDOC. It
>> doesn't
>> help to attract web designers.
>>
>
> I have no idea what professional web designers use, but I did many web
> pages using html in a regular text editor.
>
> It was awful.
>

I agree that HTML isn't great to work with directly.  Even in the realm of
small static sites, the general movement is towards treating HTML as a
presentation format.  If one wants a more convenient, non-semantic wrapper
over it, we have things like HAML <http://haml-lang.com/>,
Jade<http://haml-lang.com/>,
and a million other things.

Using Ddoc literally doubled my productivity at creating web pages.
> Furthermore, I can easily change them. This came in really handy when David
> redid the look & feel.
>

> For example, I am able to create the C++ manuals for the Kindle and the
> digitalmars.com web pages from the exact same source text, simply by using
> a different set of .ddoc macros.
>
> (Although you can supposedly convert html directly to Kindle books, in
> reality you'll discover you need to put out different html than you would
> for web display.)
>

I respect that it increased your personal productivity.  What's worth
questioning is whether it increases the productivity of the growing
community as a whole.

I don't aim to proselytize one mini-language over another, as they're much
of a muchness.  But I'd hope to convince people that:

   - Besides required functionality, the key reason to choose one
   markup/documentation/html-generating format is popularity.  It opens up
   development to new users, frees up maintainers of old documentation
   generators, and gives you new tools to use for free.  Markup formats are one
   area where Might Is Right.
   - The documentation and the D website are separate problems and shouldn't
   be conflated.  Many other languages take the approach of separating them and
   putting documentation in a subsite (e.g.
   http://doc.d-programming-language.org/).  X-site coherence can be
   maintained with pretty much just CSS.  As we all know, dividing the problem
   is the first step to conquering it.
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