Why don't you advertise more your language on Quora etc ?

[Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) via Digitalmars-d]

On 03/02/2017 10:32 AM, bachmeier wrote:
>
> I too learned to program using BASIC sometime in the mid-80's. The

Ditto here (well, late 80's). AppleSoft Basic on Apple IIc.

> "enterprise" side of things has created a completely unnecessary
> learning curve. Java being used to teach intro to computing was
> successful at exactly one thing - it drove people away from programming.

Oh, it was a disaster in so many ways, it even wound up warping the 
whole process of teaching programming basics into a total ineffective 
mess. Case in point:

Back around the height of Java schools, I was a tutor for CS 101 (Intro 
to programming, using Java) students at a university around here (John 
Carroll University). There were two instructors who taught the course: A 
prof who'd been teaching it since well before the Java craze, and a 
Java-zealout who was constantly bragging how she'd come direct from a 
real software dev studio and had real-world experience with the right 
way of doing things.

The two approached their classes very differently:

The first one, the one who had been teaching code since before Java, 
started out by teaching basic flow-of-execution. "This statement runs, 
then the next one, then the next one." Conditions, loops, functions, etc.

The second teacher, the one who was kneck-deep in the "Java/OOP is our 
god, we must not question" madness that was common in that time 
period...didn't teach it that way. Those students were instead dropped 
straight into object-oriented modeling. Because, of course, OOP is "the 
right way to do everything", as most programmers believed circa early 
2000's. (Hell, even I believed it - but I hadn't drank enough of the 
kool-aid to think it was more fundamental than basic execution flow. 
But, OOP was such a craze back then, that it was widely seen as an 
alternative to imperative programming, rather than merely a way of 
structuring imperative code, as was the real dirty little truth of Java. 
So the imperative execution-flow was thought of as "dirty", something to 
discourage and sweep under the rug instead teach as a basic fundamental.)

So, literally with ZERO exceptions: EVERY student I got from the first 
teacher's class pretty much knew what they were doing and were only 
coming to me for confirmation that they were on the right track. 
Invariably they were. And EVERY (again, zero exceptions) student I got 
from the second teacher's class was *completely* and utterly lost, and 
didn't even have enough grasp of the basics of basics that I was able to 
help them get a working program - at ALL.

Java definitely had good points (especially compared to the C++ that was 
so predominant before Java stole its thunder), but it also lead to some 
real major blunders and corrupted a lot of minds.

> Do we have such a thing with D? Unfortunately we are moving in the wrong
> direction. New users are told to write configuration files for Hello World.

Lot of truth to that: I'm a big fan of using D instead of bash for 
scripting purposes, and about a couple months ago I found myself 
promoting that approach to a guy who writes a lot of bash scripts and 
python. It was embarrassing to show this as the "hello world" for 
replacing bash scripts with D:

-------------------------
#!/usr/bin/env dub
/+ dub.sdl:

    // This is the config file for the DUB package manager,
    // but it can be embedded into your main .d file like this.
    name "myscript"
    dependency "scriptlike" version="~>0.9.6"
+/

import scriptlike;

void main(string[] args) {
     run("echo Foobar > stuff.txt");
}
-------------------------

I don't think I won him over.