My first experience as a D Newbie

[Laeeth Isharc]

On Friday, 13 October 2017 at 15:29:54 UTC, Rion wrote:
> I have probably put in a few hundred hours try to learn D and 
> get going. And half that time was pure wasted on bugs, editor 
> issues, frustration, hours looking up something that is so easy 
> in other languages, ...
>
> Recently i was helping a developer who was benchmarking 
> D+Vibe.d, on his OsX he never got parallel support to work ( 
> error fault 11 )  for Vibe.d, resulting in vibe.d running 
> single core and losing to Crystal and Rust big time ( single 
> core tests ). I do not expect him to pick up D based upon those 
> results. That was two developers trying to find the correct way 
> to force vibe.d to work parallel on his system. Lets not count 
> the hours lost for use both.
>
> So currently i am more then a bit salty about D again. Its 
> always something left or right that just does not work properly.
>
> His response was Go simply works even if it was slower then D. 
> I can state the same that despite Go its fault, it simply 
> works, same with the editor support etc. And that is frankly 
> bad advertisement for D.
>
> Now excuse me as i prepare for a long trip. Maybe its better to 
> simply pick up Go again, then keep hitting my head against the 
> wall. As i started this long blog, love and hate relationship 
> with D.


D is much less gratifying than other languages for most people.  
Just like Windows was more gratifying than Linux for most people 
in 2000.  And I suppose that's likely to change slowly, but 
continue to be the case for a while so long as people working on 
Windows don't notice when something isn't working and fix things 
at root cause.  It's usually not that much more difficult to do 
so than work around it, and it usually pays off even considered 
selfishly.

I can appreciate your frustration, but considering how many years 
knowing a programming language can pay off for, a few hundred 
hours spent to learn something new isn't that much.  That's like 
a couple of months full-time and if it works out the payback 
period should easily be a year.  Viewed rationally, that's a 
pretty good return on investment compared to most other 
opportunities available.

In a world where there are lots of smart people and knowledge is 
widely available, the barriers to opportunity (there must be 
barriers, otherwise the opportunity would be competed away) are 
often emotional ones.  So I like things where the difficulty is 
front-loaded, because they tend to be neglected by modern people 
who are used to quick gratification.  And whilst it surely can be 
frustrating, the situation is already better both on Windows and 
as regards documentation and tooling than it was in 2014.  It's 
not difficult to make little changes towards what one would like 
to see oneself.