Journey to D and Thank you

[GregR]

After quite some time developing applications in C and C++, I 
started a journey exploring new languages over the last 8 years.

Go was simple and easy to ramp up, channels were awesome, yet it 
got repetitive and tiring.

Rust had great tooling (relative to C++), nice functional 
elements, and ownership was interesting. Yet the complexity, 
verbosity, and restrictions took me back to C++.

Then came Clojure and Elixir and I thought I found my home. Yet 
as I built larger projects, I found I disliked dynamic typing, 
especially during refactoring. So after a short stop with Scala, 
it was on to Haskell. Haskell was a fun puzzle but I found myself 
often wanting to just write some damn imperative code or mess 
with memory via a pointer.

So it was back to C++, full of its warts, with a new appreciation 
for its expressiveness. Yet I really missed some of the 
functional approaches I had come to enjoy from earlier languages. 
While it certainly can be done, I found it cumbersome.

Then one evening I was doing my normal run through YouTube 
channels on programming and came across a presentation from Mike 
Shah on D. I kept on scrolling thinking back to what I heard 
before about "D being a failed attempt to improve on C++". I then 
stopped and realized I knew nothing about why this may or may not 
be true, and decided to give it a watch.

I was immediately captivated. D had the parts of C++ that I loved 
with burrs removed and simple yet powerful features added. The 
module system, tooling, function call syntax, a full-featured 
standard library, arrays, ranges, and flexible memory management 
looked awesome.

8 months in and I am still loving the langauge. I am quite 
frankly shocked D is not more well known. The power and 
expressiveness of the language makes programming fun again.

Yet today I am very disappointed. I just finished building a 
chess game w/ a simple engine in D, and I can only very rarely 
beat it..guess my chess game is not what it used to be...

Anyhow a big thank you to Mike Shah for getting content out on 
YouTube that helped me discover D. And a big thank you to the 
community that is driving the development of D. While there is no 
one perfect language, I find that for what I like to do, 
programming in D is a great fit and most importantly, enjoyable.