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

[bachmeier via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 18 March 2015 at 16:26:44 UTC, Bayan Rafeh wrote:

> I don't think I've ever enjoyed programming as much as I did 
> with D. Anything that I needed to do was doable. It's only been 
> a few months programming with it and already I feel very 
> comfortable using it.

I'm with you. Although Guile Scheme is still my favorite 
language, working with D has been the most fun I've had with a 
programming language, and I've tried dozens of languages over a 
period of almost thirty years.

> It's only when I actually started seriously programming with it 
> that I actually got a feel for it's features and how they were 
> supposed to be used. This is where it differs from Go as far as 
> I can tell from this thread. I learned D just by doing what I 
> wanted to do in it, and looking up any features I needed or 
> wanted when I wanted to use, and 99 times out of 100 I found 
> them.

Same for me. When using C, I find myself saying, "I want to do X" 
for many different values of X. There's always a reason you can't 
do X. In D I start with the assumption that I can do anything 
that comes to mind. When using Go, there's a lot of stuff you 
can't do, but there's only one reason you can't do it. Because 
the Go team thinks anyone wanting do it doesn't know how to 
program.

> This should be how D is sold. It has a higher learning curve 
> than Go or Python, but in the end you can use it in a style 
> you're comfortable with whether you come from C, Java, Haskell, 
> Lisp, whatever.

I would characterize it more as a longer learning curve than a 
higher learning curve. It's not like C++ where you have to master 
so much complicated sh*t in order to use the language. One of the 
first things I was told to do when I started with C++ was learn 
Boost. Bjarne Stroustrup has complained that Boost is excessively 
complicated, and a beginner's supposed to learn it? You don't get 
that with D. It was probably six months before I even bothered to 
learn D's templates. I have seen so many times "big language" and 
"complicated language" used interchangeably wrt D. It's a big 
language but not a complicated one IMO.