My experience making an on-disk merge sort using ranges

[Chris Cain]

On Wednesday, 27 February 2013 at 05:23:39 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> <rave>
> If only the naysayers knew how cool Phobos will be once we 
> clean it up
> and polish it into the high-quality product that it should be. 
> It's
> already showing its coolness right now by being able to do [...]
> </rave>

To add on to your rave & anecdote:

I used D in a class last year which was centered around solving 
various problems using programming. We were allowed to use 
(essentially) any language we wanted, so I thought I'd learn D by 
solving the problems. There were a few extra challenges along the 
way (such as who has the fastest solution to a problem) that 
really allowed me to flex some of D's muscles. Needless to say, 
by the end of the class, everyone came to know that D enables 
essentially all of the problems solved in (close to) the most 
efficient way easily because of its overall design and its 
standard library.

Usually I was either 1st or 2nd in speed of my solutions which 
were often only beaten by some crazy smart dude writing pure C 
code whose solutions were neigh incomprehensible. It became a 
running joke that whenever anyone asked "how did you solve this 
using only x" someone would interrupt me with "Because it's D." 
The highly efficient slicing mechanics of D's arrays are one of 
the huge reasons for so many wins.

Honestly, if I took the class again with the knowledge I've 
gained with D over the last six months of me using it 
occasionally (and with the massive improvements made to it since 
the class), I'm certain that I could do things much, much better. 
Many of the problems we solved would be easy enough to solve in 
10-15 readable lines of code using ranges and the standard 
library.