Three Unlikely Successful Features of D

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:fuxnqnmrskrfqqmhdjws at forum.dlang.org...
>
> Nested functions, auto, and scope guards were the
> three killers in the pre-D1 that roped me in. And
> they rok, oh they rok. But that is "likely success" :)
>

The main thing that grabbed me in the pre-D1 days was the lack of header 
files in a non-VM systems langauge. Everything else was icing on the cake.

Although, while it wasn't a major selling point in and of itself, the 
ability to put underscores in numeric literals *really* helped tell me, "Now 
*this* is a language that's very well thought out and values pragmatism." 
And *that* was the other main thing about D that grabbed me.

> One that surprised me personally though is import. Indeed,
> import is why I passed over D the first time I looked
> at it (in 2004 IIRC) - I saw "import" and said "gah
> include is fine, eff this Java like poo..
>

Heh, really? I started getting tired of C++ around 2002-ish, and around the 
same time, some college courses I was taking were introducing me to Java. I 
was never a fan of Java overall, and there's a lot about it I always 
*hated*, but the lack of header files was one thing that *did* really 
impress me about Java (the other things were reference semantics for classes 
and GC). It was enough that, at the time, I considered it a reasonable 
alternative to C++ for things that didn't need number crunching, high 
performance or low-level access - at least until I discovered C# and D 
(eventually I got tired of C#'s limitations, too).