Follow-up post explaining research rationale

[Adam D. Ruppe via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 14 May 2016 at 23:42:33 UTC, Joe Duarte wrote:
> By "pointless" I mean they do no useful work.

I agree, I like programs that are actually somewhat interesting.

For example, for my simpledisplay.d, the two examples I shows are:

http://dpldocs.info/experimental-docs/arsd.simpledisplay.html#event-example

and

http://dpldocs.info/experimental-docs/arsd.simpledisplay.html#pong-example


The first one demonstrates basic functions of the code, but also 
gives a useful program to run and play with. It reacts to you 
interactively so you can get a look at how your user actions are 
handled by the code.

The second one dives right into something a lot of my users are 
actually going to want to do: run some kind of interactive 
animation like a game or a scientific data explorer thing. A lot 
of people have told me they didn't actually read my document, 
they just copy/pasted that pong thing and started playing around 
to learn how to use it.


So that's my preference for examples: something you can actually 
use and modify for yourself. These are longer samples, but that 
doesn't seem to be a problem with anyone I've talked to.

> Displaying a string in a console environment is also too far 
> removed from normal computing environments like a smartphone or 
> Windows 10/MacOS graphical desktop.

seriously, death to scanf and printf.

(I like printf actually, but I REALLY dislike the standard C 
console input paradigm - and I dislike D's readf even more. I 
want to see it killed, so many newbie questions for it, and what 
do they really get out of it? It isn't all that useful in the 
real world.)



That said, the point of hello world more often than not isn't 
actually to do anything except make sure the user's compiler is 
installed correctly.... and for that, it kinda works.