Pitching D to academia

[Michael via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 6 March 2016 at 08:40:17 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> 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?
>
> The geeky graduate students are the better target.
>
> In teaching you usually want a focused clean language related 
> to the course or a language that is already adopted by industry.

This hold a lot of weight speaking as a current postgraduate. I 
find that when teaching undergraduate courses, you're very much 
restricted to a few things. First, the choice of language to 
teach at the beginning of a student's degree needs to be based on 
what they will continue to use throughout their degree and beyond 
graduating. This means that other modules with specific 
software/library requirements will need to be taken into account 
(no point in teaching D/Go/Rust when you require MATLAB for 
several modules or coursework is required to be submitted in 
C/Java in later years). So it needs to fit with other taught 
units and that means that other members of staff who do not know 
D (and honestly, often don't have the time to learn a new 
language and rewrite all of the course material) will be stuck 
teaching the students another language on top of achieving their 
unit's aims.

Second, a university needs to be able to provide sufficient 
argument for teaching a language in relation to graduate 
employment; If the job market demands C++/Java/Python and only 
know D then problems arise pretty quickly and heads of department 
are not going to approve languages in place of those with high 
industrial demand. For most graduates, experience and skills for 
graduate employment is key.

Postgraduates, on the other hand, often have more time to 
experiment, and due to the nature of postgraduate work 
(particularly Ph.D and beyond) their research tends to require 
novelty. D has proved very valuable for me during my research and 
the lack of library requirements for experiments to be written 
and tested means that I am not tied to using a particular 
language. I am of course not saying that we shouldn't try to 
encourage undergraduates to explore D, but it's very difficult to 
try and introduce a new language into the curriculum at most 
universities without a rather large volume of support and 
justifications for doing so. Just some thoughts.