Why I'm hesitating to switch to D

[Don]

Chris Molozian wrote:
>   I very much agree. When it comes to lightweight markup languages for 
> use in web (and more) templating there's: Markdown 
> <http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/>, Markdown Extra 
> <http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/extra/>, Haml 
> <http://haml-lang.com/>, Textile <http://textile.thresholdstate.com/>... 
> to name just a few. Is it worth maintaining another tool?
> 
> When it comes to documentation within source files couldn't D adopt one 
> of the many different 
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_documentation_generators>documentation 
> generators? 

Look at how many of those tools support D.

 > Again wouldn't that mean less custom tools to maintain.

I doubt it. The source for DDoc is only 2000 lines of code (and it's 
simple code). D has enough unique features that you need to fight with 
your document generation system, if it doesn't natively support D.

> Unless of course ddoc does something more than these other tools?


> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Chris
> 
> 
> On 06/29/11 09:38, James Fisher wrote:
>> On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 7:46 AM, Jacob Carlborg <doob at me.com 
>> <mailto: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
>>         <http://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?).