A few notes on choosing between Go and D for a quick project

[jmh530 via Digitalmars-d]

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this thread. I don't have much 
experience with Go, but for a quick project, my goto language is 
typically Python. However, there are definitely areas that Python 
can be frustrating (where you have to have a loop, parallel 
processing). I would view D as an ideal language to complement 
Python's downsides.

As a frequent user of R and the various scientific Python 
libraries, I found myself agreeing a lot with Russell's comments, 
particularly that idea of getting D in Jupyter. To me, the 
infrastructure/community of R or Python is the biggest benefit of 
those languages. My work is typically at a high enough level that 
it just doesn't make sense to re-invent the wheel on a lot of 
things. I don't have the programming knowledge to do something 
like get armadillo or nlopt or MC Stan to work in D. Tools, like 
Calypso, that would make it easier to get C++ libraries working 
would be very important in using D more. I've looked at the 
source code to a few of those libraries and they look 
sufficiently complicated that it puts me off the idea of trying 
to get any of them working myself.

In addition, further development of the ability to call D from R 
or Python* or Julia (or vice-versa) would also be a positive.

One point that has been discussed thoroughly was learning D from 
the website. The book is a much better resource than the 
reference materials on the website for learning D. For instance, 
if I google d language classes, it takes me to the reference 
page, which is too confusing for a beginner to the D language. 
I've learned a lot from it, but it is very hard to make much 
headway without having read the books section on classes first. 
Improving tutorials and examples might go a long way. Moreover, 
quality of tutorials and examples would also be very helpful in 
terms of getting C/C++ libraries to work and calling code in 
other languages. The Interfacing to C page in the reference 
materials is written at a sufficiently high level that I'm still 
not confident I understand it well enough to use it myself.

*When I google pyd python d language, it takes me to an old link 
at dsource.org that requires two jumps before hitting a github 
page with the more recent version of the project (new release 3 
days ago!). However, that page doesn't really give you much 
information about how to use it or anything else.