Blocking points for further D adoption

[David via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 5 June 2016 at 14:20:36 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> On Sunday, 5 June 2016 at 12:58:56 UTC, David wrote:
>> D doesn't offer a lot of return on investment for learning it,
>
> That sort of sets the tone for the rest of your post, doesn't 
> it...

Maybe. I mean no offense. I just happened to have some 
frustrations getting started with actually coding in D (not 
setting it up) and saw this post. So I voiced my frustrations. I 
really am not meaning to sound confrontational if that is what 
you meant by your comment. I obviously found some potential value 
otherwise I wouldn't have bothered.

>> ^^^ How is that helpful?
>
> Replied to this on GitHub: 
> https://github.com/dlang/phobos/pull/4397#issuecomment-223813719
>
>> The other beef I see, is that examples for functions seem like 
>> they are just ripped from random unittests and frequently 
>> reference other standard library calls without context of what 
>> they are doing.
>
> Yes, many examples are actually unit tests, to verify that the 
> displayed examples actually work. Most examples are written in 
> the style that the result of the documented function is 
> `assert`ed or `enforce`d to be correct, which may be unusual at 
> first. The chomp call does seem unnecessary in that example, 
> though.

To be honest, I was just looking to read a text file.

string source = readText("file.txt");

...seems like the obvious example to show as it is simple, shows 
a common use for the function call and it's using a primitive of 
the language. And make no mistake about it, it's a good solution. 
I was pleased by the actually D solution. It's just a shame I had 
to filter out noise in the documentation to get to see it.

It sounds small, but the delay does propagate over time. The code 
that took me 3 hours to figure out in D (not just that little 
blerp above) I reproduced in Python in like 20 minutes by just 
googling.