One more question - an untapped audience.

[Tofu Ninja]

On Monday, 10 February 2014 at 18:11:38 UTC, Steve Teale wrote:
> What can be done to capture the attention of young people in 
> the developing world?
>
> Probably the most effective thing would be if it were possible 
> to edit, compile, and run D programs on a cheap Android ARM 
> phone.
>
> Is this within the bounds of possibility?
>
> There are millions of unemployed, bored, restless, and 
> ambitious young men out there, who have saved their all to buy 
> a cheap smartphone.
>
> Any other ideas?
>
> Steve

I am only 20 and am still in university so I feel like I can 
answer this with at least my own experiences. Personally I think 
D would capture the attention of more young people if it was 
simply easier to use. The first "real" language I really got into 
was C#(about 5-6 years ago) and I think the main reason is that 
it was so flipin easy to learn and get started. All I had to do 
to set it up was download Visual Studio and I was done... period 
... The documentation was fantastic and everything was named in 
very intuitive ways. Most of the time when I was learning I would 
just ctrl+space and start scrolling through the auto-complete 
reading the documentation of all the functions right there in 
visual studio. It was soooooo easy. In my opinion the biggest 
thing holding D back by a long shot is the tooling and 
documentation... it is simply terrible. But thats just my opinion 
so I don't want anyone taking offense.

Also something that would help get younger people into D was if 
the std lib was a little bit more expansive. Look at java and c# 
in my opinion they are both so popular because their std lib is 
so large. Younger people don't like to have to deal with non 
standard libraries as they just make it so much more difficult to 
do things especially as they are still trying to learn.

The lack of a real GUI library is also a hindrance. Young people 
like to see results on the screen other than just text. That is 
why web and mobile development is so popular with young people.

tldr; Tools suck, documentation sucks, std lib is small and no 
std GUI lib...