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

Fri Mar 13 10:03:46 PDT 2015

I've not being following this list too closely, so forgive me if this has
been discussed before. Here's a simple suggestion that maybe could improve
D docs a bit.

Perhaps, psychologically, the worst about the docs is that the function
signature is used as a kind of section title. What about just reordering
things a bit? Something like:

------

**startsWith**  [this is the title, rendered in some very prominent way.
Just the function name, no parameters or anything else]

*Examples:*
// ...    [the examples section we already have today.]

*Detailed description*:  [the complete docs, as we have today]

-----

I believe the examples would do a better first impression than the full
function signature, with all runtime and template parameters. I guess most
people searching just want to see how to use the thing in the simplest
cases anyway.

This could be improved in many ways. I actually started to write some other
suggestions, but then gave up. My strongest point is that just reordering
the things could be a way to improve the perception of D with minimal
effort.

Cheers,

LMB

On Fri, Mar 13, 2015 at 12:17 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d <
digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:

> 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
>
>
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