What is the D plan's to become a used language?

brian via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Tue Jan 13 15:34:38 PST 2015


I know this thread is a little old now, and I'm not the most 
experienced programmer by a long shot, but I'll post my 2 cents 
from the n00b persepctive.

A question first: ... what do people actually have working in D?
I find very few "working examples" of things I want to do. Or 
things in general. That I can read and say "oooh that's close to 
what I want, I can tweak it a little here and there".

Eg.
I want a program to write tweets.
I can't just google "twitter example d" and find a nice starter 
program to connect a write a tweet.
Do the same with "twitter example java" and you'll probably have 
your problem solved within half an hour.
So in half an hour I have a java program, and not a d one. I'll 
probably make changes to my java one and grow that, rather than 
trying to rewrite it in D because I don't even know it will work.

The same can be said when I try to do other things too:
Like parse a webpage.
Or connect to APIs.
(maybe I'm constantly looking for things that other's don't do, 
but that's unlikely)

So for me, it's getting easier to solve my simple programming 
problems in other languages because I can find examples that a) 
others have posted and b) others have the same issues I face.
I can't find those things in D nearly as easily (is this a limit 
of searching the term "D" or dlang?)

> try
>      solveMyProblem(close_to_exactly);
> catch(Exception e)
>      writeln("this library sucks");
> finally {
>      do it myself with exactly what i need and little more
> }

I'd *love* to be able to do this, but if libraries don't work, 
personally, I don't know where to start most of the time. What if 
there isn't a library at all? html headers, oauth, blah blah. I 
may as well build a rocket. I have plenty of projects where I hit 
a wall (which I don't think is necessarily a language thing, but 
trying to use D to get to something else/do something).

So in summary, from my perspective I find it difficult to solve 
the programming challenges I face, using D. Maybe that's a skill 
thing.
Lack of working examples makes taking that first leap daunting.
Lack of connectivity (to the things I want to connect to) is 
frustrating. Through googling, I'll be able to get something 
running quicker in another language than continue trying to get D 
to work.
If I find these issues, and I'm moderately intelligent, I'm sure 
others have the same issues.
I love the language, but if someone wanted a language to learn, I 
don't think I would recommend D. :(


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