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

[bachmeier via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 16 March 2015 at 08:54:20 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> Similarly, D's never going to do very well with programmers who 
> don't care about the efficiency of their code: simpler, slower 
> languages like python or ruby have that niche sewn up.  The 
> best we can do is point out that if you're already here for the 
> advanced features, it can also be used for scripting and the 
> like.  And of course, we should always strive to make things as 
> easy as we can for both small and large projects, including 
> better documentation.

I don't necessarily agree with that. I'd say Python and Ruby will 
dominate among programmers that don't care about efficiency *and* 
are writing simple scripts. Ruby's my go-to language for writing 
small scripts to manipulate a little text or to move some files 
around. D is just a better language once you get into bigger 
tasks.

With respect to scripting, I see the main documentation problem 
being one of examples. You shouldn't have to understand how 
templates work in order to write a script. Documentation related 
to ranges is a big offender. Ranges are used all over the 
language, yet there's no way the average Joe is going to figure 
out how to use functions that return a range, and there's no 
reason it should be that way. I once proposed a ban on auto as a 
return type in documentation examples and the response was that 
you should know how to use the language before reading the 
documentation.