Quora: Why hasn't D started to replace C++?

[John Gabriele]

On Thursday, 1 February 2018 at 11:06:09 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Wed, 2018-01-31 at 16:13 +0000, John Gabriele via 
> Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> […]
>> this older language from times past, before C++11, and using 
>> ddoc
>> for docs instead of markdown contributes to this perception. 
>> Let
>> me know if you'd like help in translating D website and doc 
>> pages
>> from ddoc to markdown.
>
> I am sure Markdown is find for single page HTML pages, but for 
> bigger documents that need to render to HTML or PDF (or other 
> e-publishing formats) surely AsciiDoctor and XeLaTeX are the 
> only choices.

It's trivial to put multiple markdown files together into a large 
doc, if that's desired. Just put a bunch of .md files together 
into the same directory and run your markdown processor on them. 
They can link to each other in the [normal 
way](./other-file.html#normal-way).

Markdown provides a simple, practical, modern, and commonly-known 
way to get docs written fast and by anyone who wants to pop in 
and improve them. There's no easier way to write plain text docs 
that look as good.

Sorry, can't recall if I already mentioned this, but D suffers 
from a perception that it's "old", or "the language that tried 
and failed to replace C++". Something simple like markdown for 
its docs sends a clear message that D is modern and knows when to 
pivot to new and better ways after the old ways are not serving 
it anymore.

Incidentally, choosing an established standard like markdown is a 
good way to short-circuit bikeshedding about "it what ways should 
ddoc be updated to include some markdown features?". Just pick 
standard CommonMark markdown and you're done.

One last note and I'll (try to!) stop: it's difficult enough to 
get good writers to help with docs. Much more so when they've got 
to first learn your own language-specific markup (which is only 
useful with your project).