Pitching D to academia

[Thiez via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 10 March 2016 at 21:54:33 UTC, Andrew wrote:
> Don't forget to mention all the "software engineering" 
> principles that can be taught using D too including:
>
> Design by Contract
> Literate programming (embedded documentation)
>
> and to tool that come "standard" in the language such as
>
> Coverage
> Profiling

Surely a language such as Java is much better for things like 
design by contract through JML? It may not be built-in such as 
D's `in` and `out` blocks, but there is tool-support for both 
runtime and static checking, and JML can also describe things 
such as class invariants. That it took over two years for a bug 
such as https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7910 to get 
fixed indicates to me that nobody is really using design by 
contract in D, and makes me wonder how many more bugs are hiding 
there. Java and JML have been used in both academia and the 
industry for almost two decades (although it's not as popular as 
it could be...) so I expect most of the easy-to-encounter bugs 
have been solved by now.