On Monday, 7 January 2013 at 19:59:44 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 1/7/2013 5:31 AM, Chris wrote:
Nice article. Once I have enough time I would like to write a
short article
about how D has solved practical issues for me.
Please do!
I'd love to.
I think it is not enough to talk
about all the features of the language (templates, GC) without
giving practical
examples
This is a very important point. Without showing how features
combine to solve interesting problems, people tend to view
lists of features as just
...buzz...buzz...buzz...buzz...buzz...
Exactly, especially since not everyone who uses a programming
language uses it because of _all_ the features but because it
solves certain specific problems for them. Think of scientists
who create a tool for their research (e.g. Hidden Markov models -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Markov_model). They are not
necessarily interested in templates, but they might need speed,
concurrency and interfacing to existing C libraries. Python took
off in the scientific community (well, it was designed as a
scientific language, I think). The question is usually "What can
the language do for me? How can it help me?" The good thing about
D is that it can help a lot of people in a lot of different ways
(systems programming, UTF-8, concurrency etc.) but not everyone
needs all features (and you don't need to use them all at the
same time). D can boast that it has it all but people need to see
what "all" means, and here we need practical examples (real
projects).
Another thing, IMO, is that there is an overemphasis on C++ vs.
D. Usually people have to choose between systems programming
(learn C/C++) or high level (learn Python, Ruby etc.). Most
non-programmers who need to write a piece of software opt for
Python and other scripting languages, because nobody wants to
learn C/C++ only to write a small parser for data files. With D
you no longer have to choose. You can write both quick and dirty
script-like stuff and stuff that is close to the machine. Python
and Ruby took off, I think, because they appealed to people who
are not fully fledged programmers but who want or need to do some
programming. This is the crowd the D community has to get on
board. Don't forget that this is what has made JavaScript one of
the most widely used languages (alas!).
