Why I'm Excited about D

[John Colvin via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 6 April 2015 at 23:51:17 UTC, Adam Hawkins wrote:
> Hello everyone, this is my first post on the forum. I've been 
> investigating the language for the past few weeks. I was able 
> to complete my first useful program thanks to very helpful 
> people in #d on IRC . The experience made me very interested in 
> the language and improving the community around it.
>
> I'm primarily Ruby developer (been so about the last 7-8 years) 
> doing web stuff with significant JavaScript work as well. I 
> wrote a blog post on why I'm excited about D. You can read it 
> here: http://hawkins.io/2015/04/excited-about-d/.
>
> I've been reading the forums here so I can see that there is a 
> focus on improving the marketing for the language and growing 
> the community. I see most of the effort is geared towards C++ 
> programmers, but have you considered looking at us dynamic 
> languages folk? I see a big upside for us. Moving from Ruby to 
> D (my case) gives me power & performance. I still have OOP 
> techniques but I still have functional things like closures and 
> all that good stuff. Only trade off in the Ruby case is 
> metaprogramming. All in all I think there is a significant 
> value promise for those of us doing backend services for folks 
> like me.
>
> Regardless, I figured it might be interesting to hear about 
> some experience coming to the language from a different 
> perspective. Cheers!

This is awesome :)

A few notes on the blog:

"peaked my interest" should be "piqued my interest"

You can have as many unittest blocks as you want in a file/module.

@property isn't really about parentheses-less calls (parentheses 
are optional for all function calls), it's more for this sort of 
thing:
struct S
{
     private int a_;
     enum flagMask = 1u << 31;
     @property void val(int v)
     {
         a_ = (a_ & flagMask) & (v & ~flagMask);
     }
     @property int val()
     {
         return a_ & ~flagMask;
     }
     @property void flag(bool b)
     {
         a_ = ((cast(uint)b) << 31) & (a_ & ~mask);
     }
     @property bool flag()
     {
         return a_ & flagMask;
     }
}
unittest
{
     S s;
     s.flag = true;
     s.val = 75;
     assert(s.flag);
     assert(s.val == 75);
}

Note that the assignments are calling the property functions.