Pitching D to academia

[Seb via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 6 March 2016 at 07:38:01 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
> Motivated by Dmitry's "Pitching D to a gang of Gophers" thread, 
> how about pitching it to a gang of professors and graduate 
> students?
>

If you want D to flourish, you should _really_ focus on this.
Many CS students usually learn only one or two language at 
university.
At our university you can learn those in courses:

- Java for OOP
- Perl (not kidding) for scripting (normally now Python or 
sometimes JS is used)
- Haskell/OCaml/F# for functional programming
- C/C++ for system programming, imperative programming

The awesome part and what I love so much about D is that you can 
teach all of those in ONE language.

However my point is that most students will continue to use the 
language they learn at university (or maybe high school) forever 
- it's really similar to one's "native tongue" - this *not* only 
means that they get used to it, but they also will start new 
projects with it and continue to develop in this language. In 
other words: this will result in a huge increase of the user base 
and thus also (financial) interest in the D.

Why don't we make a Coursera (or similar) course about D? They 
usually have an audience of at least 50-100K.

In case money is pretty tight, some of these platforms even have 
special credit programs (25-50K$) to fund development of new 
courses, but usually a university is happy to sponsor the 
production costs for such a course if they can write their name 
on it.