A look at the D programming language by Ferdynand Górski

[Chris]

On Monday, 7 January 2013 at 19:59:44 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 1/7/2013 5:31 AM, Chris wrote:
>> Nice article. Once I have enough time I would like to write a 
>> short article
>> about how D has solved practical issues for me.
>
> Please do!

I'd love to.

>
>
>> I think it is not enough to talk
>> about all the features of the language (templates, GC) without 
>> giving practical
>> examples
>
> This is a very important point. Without showing how features 
> combine to solve interesting problems, people tend to view 
> lists of features as just
>
>    ...buzz...buzz...buzz...buzz...buzz...

Exactly, especially since not everyone who uses a programming 
language uses it because of _all_ the features but because it 
solves certain specific problems for them. Think of scientists 
who create a tool for their research (e.g. Hidden Markov models - 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Markov_model). They are not 
necessarily interested in templates, but they might need speed, 
concurrency and interfacing to existing C libraries. Python took 
off in the scientific community (well, it was designed as a 
scientific language, I think). The question is usually "What can 
the language do for me? How can it help me?" The good thing about 
D is that it can help a lot of people in a lot of different ways 
(systems programming, UTF-8, concurrency etc.) but not everyone 
needs all features (and you don't need to use them all at the 
same time). D can boast that it has it all but people need to see 
what "all" means, and here we need practical examples (real 
projects).

Another thing, IMO, is that there is an overemphasis on C++ vs. 
D. Usually people have to choose between systems programming 
(learn C/C++) or high level (learn Python, Ruby etc.). Most 
non-programmers who need to write a piece of software opt for 
Python and other scripting languages, because nobody wants to 
learn C/C++ only to write a small parser for data files. With D 
you no longer have to choose. You can write both quick and dirty 
script-like stuff and stuff that is close to the machine. Python 
and Ruby took off, I think, because they appealed to people who 
are not fully fledged programmers but who want or need to do some 
programming. This is the crowd the D community has to get on 
board. Don't forget that this is what has made JavaScript one of 
the most widely used languages (alas!).