A few notes on choosing between Go and D for a quick project

[Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d]

On 3/13/15 7:51 AM, Chris wrote:
> On Friday, 13 March 2015 at 14:34:23 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
>> On Fri, 2015-03-13 at 14:20 +0000, Chris via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> […]
>>
>>> reluctant to learn something new. Crowd 2. we can win over, yet we
>>> have failed to communicate with them, to reach out to them. Most
>>> people I know have a look at D's homepage and say "Uh! Hm. Ah, I'll
>>> use Python." No, they are not hardcore programmers, they are
>>> engineers and scientists. But they are _users_, people who need to
>>> write software to analyze data, to create something. We should not
>>> ignore them, even if they are not (initially) interested in templates
>>> and metaprogramming. Neither was I, when I first learned D.
>>
>> It is not Python or R or Julia the language that people choose, it is
>> the superstructure built on top. So for Python, it is Pandas,
>> Matplotlib, SciPy, NumPy. And the ability to use ready made C, C++ and
>> Fortran libraries.
>
> Exactly, that's part of it. People don't understand that they can use
> all the C libraries with D as well. And if they do, "extern (C)" is too
> "complicated", at least more complicated than "import numbergrind". I'm
> really at loss here, I don't know how to communicate these things to
> people. Colleagues and text books that talk about R and Python weigh so
> much more than "D can actually interface to C without any effort".[1]
>
> Also, sometimes I have the impression that people use any excuse not to
> use D.

That may as well be basic psychology at work. Curb appeal (or lack 
thereof) is difficult to explain but is easy to rationalize with 
unrelated arguments.

There is something loosely related to curb appeal that has been 
discussed here before. Consider someone just starts with D and wants to 
figure whether there's a startsWith function in D.

So they google for something like ``dlang startswith''. Nicely enough 
http://dlang.org/phobos/std_algorithm.html comes up first. (Ideally the 
individual page http://dlang.org/library/std/algorithm/starts_with.html 
would come up.)

Anyhow, assuming the user clicks on the former, startsWith is easy to 
find at the top and then when you click on it...

====
uint startsWith(alias pred = "a == b", Range, Needles...)(Range 
doesThisStart, Needles withOneOfThese) if (isInputRange!Range && 
Needles.length > 1 && is(typeof(.startsWith!pred(doesThisStart, 
withOneOfThese[0])) : bool) && is(typeof(.startsWith!pred(doesThisStart, 
withOneOfThese[1..$])) : uint));
bool startsWith(alias pred = "a == b", R1, R2)(R1 doesThisStart, R2 
withThis) if (isInputRange!R1 && isInputRange!R2 && 
is(typeof(binaryFun!pred(doesThisStart.front, withThis.front)) : bool));
bool startsWith(alias pred = "a == b", R, E)(R doesThisStart, E 
withThis) if (isInputRange!R && 
is(typeof(binaryFun!pred(doesThisStart.front, withThis)) : bool));
====

This in big bold font, too. The HTML way of saying, "you wanted 
startsWith? I'll give you more startsWith than you can carry." Picture 
the effect this has on someone who just wanted to see if a string starts 
with another.

We need to make the template constraints distinct for formatting in ddoc.

Sadly http://dlang.org/library/std/algorithm/starts_with.html is bad in 
other ways. It doesn't have any examples! In contrast, the unified page 
does have some decent examples.

This all is under the "curb appeal" category.


Andrei