Too focused on C++ programmers?

[Etienne]

On 2013-12-02 08:12, Etienne wrote:
> On 2013-11-28 15:27, qznc wrote:
>> I read an interesting article [0] with a weird title. It got me thinking
>> about Ds marketing [1]. Are we too focused on the C++ programmers? Most
>> of them are very unlikely to switch. In comparison, D should be much
>> easier to sell to people, who are already considering
>> Go/Scala/Clojure/Node.js/etc. I restructured [2] the tutorial to target
>> them more specifically.
>>
>> [0] http://braythwayt.com/2013/11/27/herd-thither-me-hither.html#revised
>> [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6814922
>> [2] http://qznc.github.io/d-tut/basics.html
>
> I started reading seriously about D about 3 months ago so maybe I can
> comment a bit on this while my newcomer experience is fresh.
>
> My background is PHP (turned away when searching for speed with
> benchmarks), I was reading about C++ since 6 months trying to develop a
> compiled application that has enough libraries to let me choose from. I
> ended up choosing Qt for my desktop app but I wanted type-genericity so
> I needed templates or tuples, and there was no way to make a templated
> QObject, I was a bit disappointed by that, and the lack of
> comprehensible errors in templated c++.
>
> I found D multiple times when searching for C++ libraries, and when I
> decided to just "fuck it and read the unrelated stuff" got thrilled when
> I saw how well D has integrated tuples. It was a promising way to keep
> my old PHP ways while improving my abilities.
>
> I think D seized me because it introduced the Ranges concept in a
> compiled language. Of course, I had to do some research about the
> libraries depending on what I needed, but as soon as I saw how easy D
> bindings to C libraries were it was obvious I'd find what I need. Also
> what helped were the tools like pegged, vibe.d, and knowing any
> application can just wrap around a C library and turn into something
> intuitive and fast thanks to the introspective capabilities of D.
>
> So I would assume, from PHP to C++ to D, I wanted to see this within 20
> seconds in this order:
> 1) Tuples, Ranges & Templates (with intuitive error examples)
> 2) C Bindings easily extended with D introspective wrappers (for quick
> metaprogramming support)
> 3) Open Networking / DB libraries with static compilation
> 4) GTKd, because you have to admit there's no other stable way of making
> a GUI
>
> Maybe an example of signals and slots with associative arrays or tuples
> would be a quick example of most of the features in D, with a __traits
> static if / foreach loop.
>
> Also, I wish I had learned about Dub, Mono-D & Visual-D sooner with an
> easier tutorial. Maybe an installer with Visual Integrated Shell and
> Visual-D combined would help newcomers, and instrudctions for Mono-D's
> handling of package.json files as project solutions. I had to try too
> many out-of-date or not-good-yet tools.
>
> Hope it helps, this is also my first post on these forums ;)
>
> Etienne


Also, you should include a dmd-d (debug build) in the installer. You'd 
be surprised how it can save time with ICE errors to have it handy, it 
would be useful to suggest using it within these ICE error reports. I'm 
sure everyone in the D community was puzzled by an internal compiler 
error at least once and found there was a simple easy to fix bug in 
their code behind it.