d from the outside

[Ramon]

john james

I'm afraid you hit a point there. Documentation is existing and 
being worked on but still leaves a lot to desire.

But then, to be fair, one came come along quite well with D and 
what can't be found right away, can be asked here, particularly 
in the D.learn Forum.

While I'm absolutely not sure that Go is a good language to learn 
for a programming newbie, I'm pretty sure that D isn't.
Don't get me wrong, D is a great language (why else would I be 
here?), but in my minds eye (some will strongly oppose that view) 
it's not for newbies and possibly not even for seasoned 
programmers unless one has a certain combination of mindset, 
needs and capabilities.

It might be helpful for you to ask some questions beyond the 
language itself. After all it's not about the language itself 
only but also about the environment, the available tools, etc.

One example is comfort (as in "find one click installation sets 
for Win/Apple/Linux/*BSD/Solaris in the Download section").

Another (somewhat sad for D) example is your needs for a 
development environment. There seems to be a rule of thumb that 
says that major and well established languages offer complete, 
even luxurious, IDE support for all major OSs while less well 
established and mature languages might offer not much more than 
"Emacs is supported and there is some half cooked Eclipse and 
Code:Blocks support" which might be a prohibitively large hurdle 
for a beginner.

Yet another issue is libraries. A newbie might be better served 
with, say, FreePascal or Python which both have a nice set of 
batteries included.

If I were to put D into one single sentence (beware! I'm a D 
newbie myself) it would be "C/C++ done right and with a major 
focus on systems programming".

For some people (like ourselves here) D's capabilities and 
potential are well worth to be patient, to contribute to it (and 
it's environment!) and D is or comes damn close to what we always 
wanted.

One point that might make D somewhat less attractive for CS 
students is the fact (well, according to my impression) that one 
doesn't care that much about concepts around here but rather 
about performance and somehow hacking it to work.

In any case it will be hard for you to decide - and for us to 
helpfully advise - without you considering/telling us somewhat 
more about your needs.

On a somewhat private sidenote: I value Pike highly and I had a 
closer look at Go but don't consider it highly in any regard. 
Frankly, my impression was "lots of exitement and hype and some 
nice gadgets but rather insignificant (no matter how many fans it 
attracts).

In case you decide to stay with D or to at least test it somewhat 
more extensively, you should definitely get the book "The D 
Programming Language" by Andrei Alexandrescu, one of the major D 
figures and a major contributor to D.

Have a look at the wiki and at the D.learn forum!