d from the outside

[Joakim]

On Sunday, 1 September 2013 at 18:43:05 UTC, Ramon wrote:
> 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.
I agree.  D tries to be all things for all programmers, hence the 
recent thread about whether D is the language for both high-level 
and performance programming, but there's only a small group of 
people who would even know how to exercise all those 
capabilities.  Newbies like john probably get overwhelmed by the 
complexity.  For example, slices are always talked about as a 
great feature in D, but most programmers don't understand 
pointers: they're not going to get slices either.  The hardcore 
users are just going to use whatever is the entrenched standard, 
that's C++.

That leaves D in a never-never land for mass usage: too complex 
for newbies, too niche for those who want to get serious work 
done.  I think D can break out of this trap to some extent and do 
very well, but it's a hard problem to solve.  I will say that 
I've never had installation problems with D, but I've never tried 
to use it on a Mac either.

The key is probably getting some popular apps built in D, where 
the developers rave about how D helped them get their work done 
better and faster.  I am not aware of such design wins for D yet, 
but I hope and believe they will be there someday.