Pitching D to academia

Craig Dillabaugh via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Wed Mar 9 08:25:46 PST 2016


On Wednesday, 9 March 2016 at 16:12:08 UTC, Michael wrote:
> On Sunday, 6 March 2016 at 08:40:17 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
> wrote:
>> On Sunday, 6 March 2016 at 07:38:01 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
>>> Motivated by Dmitry's "Pitching D to a gang of Gophers" 
>>> thread, how about pitching it to a gang of professors and 
>>> graduate students?
>>
>> The geeky graduate students are the better target.
>>
>> In teaching you usually want a focused clean language related 
>> to the course or a language that is already adopted by 
>> industry.
>
clip
>
> Postgraduates, on the other hand, often have more time to 
> experiment, and due to the nature of postgraduate work 
> (particularly Ph.D and beyond) their research tends to require 
> novelty. D has proved very valuable for me during my research 
> and the lack of library requirements for experiments to be 
> written and tested means that I am not tied to using a 
> particular language. I am of course not saying that we 
> shouldn't try to encourage undergraduates to explore D, but 
> it's very difficult to try and introduce a new language into 
> the curriculum at most universities without a rather large 
> volume of support and justifications for doing so. Just some 
> thoughts.

I may be way off-base here but would teaching assembly be a good 
way
to get D into the hands of undergrads?  Learning assembly requires
some sort of 'harness' to code your assembly in.  The few such 
tools (NASM) are, by my memory, rather painful to work with.  
Could using DMDs inline assembler allow for a clean way of 
learning assembly

I say this as someone who never took a proper assembly course as 
an undergrad (we used a simulated/simple assembly lanaguage).  
I've since tried to learn Intel assembly with NASM or something 
similar, but had limited time and got frustrated with the tools.




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