One more question - an untapped audience.

[Meta]

On Monday, 10 February 2014 at 20:32:03 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
> I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment, although I am a 
> little older and got my start in a combination of VB6 and C++98.

Same for me when I first started learning to program. I did a VB6 
course in highschool, followed by a Java course, as well as 
teaching myself C++ on my own to hack on my Nintendo DS. Looking 
back, good tutorials were the biggest help. I didn't know 
anything about anything, and I don't know if I would ever have 
been able to figure out C++ without sites like cplusplus.com. 
Bartosz Milewski's C++ in Action book was a huge help too. I'm 
glad he decided to publish it for free on the web.

> And the .NET Framework or Java Frameworks. I know that the 
> linux-heads scoff at the idea of shipping a large standard 
> library, "Download the library that works best for you" they 
> cry! Well, that answer is unacceptable for newbies, mostly 
> because they don't actually know which library will work for 
> them, or with D, or on the operating system they are using. Big 
> standard libraries provide a new user with all the tools that 
> they need to write many programs. This isn't to say that the 
> standard library needs to include everything one might need to 
> build any app every. I still use third-party libraries. I just 
> don't use them to fill in common functionality. For example, I 
> have a library that provides special types of inputboxes, but 
> WPF (a big part of the .NET Framework) provides a generic 
> inputbox. Then we use EntityFramework, .NET provides the 
> generic interface that is used by EntityFramework, LINQ, but EF 
> itself extends the framework in specialized ways. The framework 
> should absolutely include as many general tools as possible.

I absolutely agree with that. Phobos should strive to be as 
"batteries included" as possible while minimizing (ideally 
eliminating) third party dependencies.

> Building a new IDE won't solve this problem. Here we need to 
> focus on building better tools for D, turning DMD itself into a 
> library or Compiler-as-a-Service in the current lingo, since 
> libraries are now "services". D needs to make great strides in 
> tooling to be relevant, we need first-class debugging, and they 
> need to support more than the terminal. We need D as library, 
> we need better IDE integrations. We need a broader standard 
> library. We need more bindings for existing libraries. We need 
> more new libraries (like the Aurora library I am working on).
>
> But most importantly we need to stop whining about the problems 
> and start doing something about them. There are plenty of 
> projects in these areas that are being run by a single person 
> that could use any help. For example, I know that Rainer 
> Schutze of VisualD fame is quite open to pull requests. If you 
> use a library from a language other than D and have a D binding 
> for it, get it in Deimos.

I've come to agree that good IDE integration is a must. I use C# 
at work, and Visual Studio makes refactoring and code generation 
near-effortless. I agree with Walter that we definitely shouldn't 
need an IDE to use D, but there is no competition when it comes 
to the productivity that a good IDE enables.