reddit discussion about Go turns to D again

[Timon Gehr]

> You are to a certain extent right, but Go is appealing in a few ways.
>
> Many Go users are coming from C or scripting languages, so Go is an
> evolution for them, even if the language is a downgrade from major
> programming language features.
>
> Then many of the developers that are impressed by Go's multicore
> features, are not aware of the nice libraries available for C++, JVM or
> .Net.
>
> There is the possibility that Go will make it into Android.
>
> The web site is always up to date with the latest language specification and
> they have weekly and stable releases.
>
> There not much to say about Go, other than the language looks like a new
> version of Alef from Plan9 with a bit of Oberon. But Google's backing, plus
> the way they deal with the community is increasing its use.
>
> I wish D would evolve the same way.
>
> --
> Paulo

I think D has difficulties getting new users, although it is superior to any
programming language I know in almost every way.

Probably the main 'show brakes' for D are:

1. Lack of documentation. The documentation we have on digitalmars.com/d/2.0 is
sufficient for me, but it is not up-to-date and it is too complicated for a
newcomer to get started with. I think many will be turned off by the fact that
there is no tutorial for newcomers on the main site, but you can get all details
about some old version of the D grammar. It also stops D from becoming a teaching
language at institutions. Apart from that, the website does not look half as
professional as D is well designed. It is not structured at all. If you want to
learn about what D is about, you have to read the whole website. Also, the
documentation comments in some Phobos modules should improve, regardless of their
formatting.

2. Someone who is curious about D will google 'd', which takes them straight to
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/. They will then press the back button on their
browser, because it does not look appealing. Then they will find the link to
Wikipedia. If they are really curious, they will read the whole thing, to learn
that they really can get the official compiler from digitalmars.com they will also
see very little of D but read everything about "Problems and Controversies". The
Wikipedia article, in my eyes, fails to give sufficient information about what D
is about. It only lists features and gives code samples.

They will then go back to http://www.digitalmars.com/d/ , where the most important
link is not only the most important, but well, the smallest in size as well: 2.0
After clicking it, you they have to scroll down to find a link to the download
site, where they need to read the whole table, because there are no OS-symbols
leading them to the one-click-install. Many will just download the first thing and
end up with the source and some binaries.

(I have seen it happen multiple times!)

A better process would be: google 'd', get to a totally beautiful website, have
some display of D philosophy, a big section DOWNLOAD DMD D COMPILER that cannot be
missed, beneath it there are symbols representing different OS's that can be
clicked to get the appropriate installer and done. The next thing on the site
should be a big link D TUTORIAL, linking to a very well written tutorial.

This needs fixing, badly. But it is much work...

3. The reference compiler is somewhat buggy. But after seeing the changelog for
2.053 I am optimistic this will change very soon.


Timon