D popularity

[Knud Soerensen]

On 2013-01-20 10:52, SaltySugar wrote:
> Why it isn't popular?  We must popularize it. There aren't any tutorials
> with D, books and other stuff. How about writing a D programming forum?


Hi, I have just return to D after some years of absents,
so I am sorry if some of what I write is incorrect.

== Massive open online courses (MOOC's) ==

According to this study http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2ITaI4y7_0
Many people pick up a new language when taking a course/education.

With the reason rise of MOOC's (see https://class-central.com/)
I think that making an interesting MOOC where D is used extensive would
be good way to make D popular.

I have taken some MOOCs and been exposed different languages in the
process.
1) Octave in Probabilistic Graphical Models.
2) R in Introduction to Computational Finance and Financial Econometrics.
3) Python in Web Intelligence and Big Data, Software Debugging,
Computational Investing.

For me it is important that the course is not about D but about an
interesting subject
where D fit perfect as a tool. I have given it some thoughts and I think
robotics is a
good subject for such a course. You both need code which is close to the
hardware
and a language where you can make abstract AI algorithms.

I think a course like "nand to tetris" (http://www.nand2tetris.org/)
for robotics is highly needed, because for robotics a good foundation in
mechanical-, electronic- and software-engineering is need
and I don't know any single MOOC's which provide this foundation.


== online documentation ==
When I returned to D I felt very frustrated with D online documentation.
After looking for root of the feeling i found that the reason was that
I was used to the documentation of php.
In php each function have a page of it own. (Closely resembling the unix
man page)
This means that if I search for "php strip" google send me to
http://php.net/manual/en/function.trim.php

Where the first line tells me:
trim — Strip whitespace (or other characters) from the beginning and end
of a string

So It is very fast to see if I got the right page.

If I search for "dlang strip" I am send to
http://dlang.org/phobos/std_string.html.
Then I have to look through the document to find the right function
and to find that functions typical is missing examples and good
descriptions of parameters and return values.

(I think that the example part can be improved by automatic including
unittest in the documentation,
which would also insure that the examples is working.)
(When documents is generated ddoc could test for if description for
parameters and return values was present)

Also another thing I like about the php documentation is the user notes
at the bottom of the page,
I know you are trying to make something simmilar with the "Improve this
page" and "Page wiki" at the top,
but I have to say that I don't think it works as well.

==  Geting the job done ==
All in all I think the language popularity comes down to one central thing.
"Does it get the job done" !! and it also the reason I have returned to
D after years of absent.
It is because of vibe http://vibed.org/ in the world of today almost
every company have to have a web-site.
So, there is a lots of jobs building web-sites, but D hadn't had a
dissent web framework until now AFAIK.
Remember that ruby was a small language before ruby on rails.
While vibe have some way to go it is a good start.

== Thanks, for all ==

While somethings could be better, I think D is amazing !


Knud