D as a college language

[bachmeier]

On Friday, 4 May 2018 at 12:00:43 UTC, Sjoerd Nijboer wrote:
> Instead it would offer teachers who are looking for new new 
> teaching material some material that is closely coupled to 
> other material with a small set of technologies. Thus not 
> forcing students to learn a new language every other course. I 
> hope that that would invite teachers to use D as a language for 
> learning.

This is key. I don't know how much adoption there would be, but 
free, professional-quality teaching materials would make it much 
easier to adopt.

One way that I could see D getting its foot in the door is an 
intro course using Java or Python but where the instructor wants 
to devote a couple of lectures to low-level programming using 
pointers. D would be perfect for that due to the convenient 
syntax. Other topics like metaprogramming or memory management 
would also be reasons to use D.

I don't think the lack of industry usage is anywhere close to the 
problem posed by lack of teaching materials and instructor 
knowledge. After all, Scheme was widely used for decades, and in 
some places is still is.