Marketing of D - article topic ideas?

[sybrandy]

On 06/03/2010 07:58 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
> D is an extremely powerful language, but when I read complaints and
> sighs about other languages, few seem to know that these problems are
> solved with D. Essentially, we have a marketing problem.
>
> One great way to address it is by writing articles about various aspects
> of D and how they solve problems, like
> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cb14j/compiletime_function_execution_in_d/
> which was well received on reddit.
>
> Anyone have good ideas on topics for D articles? And anyone want to
> stand up and write an article?
>
> They don't have to be comprehensive articles (though of course those are
> better), even blog entries will do.

One thing that I think will really make people really notice D is 
std.concurrency.  If it makes concurrency as easy as that in Erlang, 
that will be a huge win and definitely make it stand out vs. many other 
languages.

Here are some other thoughts:

- Compare D to scripting languages like Perl and Python to show how you 
can do similar things.  I suggest this because to me, it seems like D 
compares very nicely to Perl 5 in terms of getting things done.  Also, 
if you show that the code is about as easy to write, fast to compile, 
and can do the job in less time, win!

- Re-write some basic Unix utilities in D and compare the code.  grep 
would probably be a good one to start with since it can leverage D's 
built in regular expressions.

- Show how much better D is at handling errors/exceptions with some 
real-world examples.  A big win would be to show that D can resist some 
common attacks, such as buffer overflows.  That would be interesting to 
people who have to write secure network applications.

Casey