One more question - an untapped audience.

Manu turkeyman at gmail.com
Tue Feb 11 17:48:11 PST 2014


On 11 February 2014 05:03, Tofu Ninja <emmons0 at purdue.edu> wrote:

> 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.
>

Oh... my... god...

+ulong.max!

This is like music to my ears! :)
I've been banging on about the importance of this stuff forever, and so
frequently get dismissed as being lazy or irrelevant.


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...
>

It's great to hear it directly from the sort of people that I always refer
to when I talk about this stuff! :)

Fortunately, it has been recognised that tooling must be made a central
focus.
Small steps like VisualD being moved to dlang.org, bundled with the DMD
installer, issues tracking in the main bugtracker, etc.
This is ideally intended to improve visibility of tooling related issues.

What we really lack though, is a couple more Rainer and Alexander's. Worth
their weight in gold!

The other major hurdle is a proper parser usable for tooling. Many are
trying to reinvent the wheel, and nothing short of the DMD front-end itself
is really capable of properly parsing D code.
The biggest missing component I'm aware of is this
DMD-frontend-as-a-library idea that is always being discussed, but never
seems to be happening. If I had to nominate a single critical goal for the
ecosystem for 2014, that would be it.
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