Pitching D to academia

[Andrew 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?
>
> I will be presenting D to such an audience at METU in Ankara. 
> What are the points that you would stress? I am thinking that 
> they would be interested more in whether D is better as a 
> teaching tool. Do you agree?
>
> Ali

As an academic, the things I would hope you would cover are:

Simplicity:  That is, its real easy to say something in D, and 
certainly easier than in Java.  The message here is stop teaching 
Java and start teaching D to first year students.

Cleanness of expression: That is, it is so much easier to express 
yourself in D than in C++ (for example, template 
meta-programming).  That is, use D as an intermediate language 
for second year students learning about algorithms.

Multi-paradigm:  That is, since you already know OOP and D, you 
can learn other paradigms with a language you already know 
(functional, parallel, embedded, etc).  That is, use D for third 
year programming language courses too.

If you with to appeal to the brightest students then you need to 
cover topics of interest to them.  That would include interfaces 
to tools they understand (Hadoop, etc), efficiency (i.e. the 
@nogc), distributed programming, and so on.