john james
I'm afraid you hit a point there. Documentation is existing and
being worked on but still leaves a lot to desire.
But then, to be fair, one came come along quite well with D and
what can't be found right away, can be asked here, particularly
in the D.learn Forum.
While I'm absolutely not sure that Go is a good language to learn
for a programming newbie, I'm pretty sure that D isn't.
Don't get me wrong, D is a great language (why else would I be
here?), but in my minds eye (some will strongly oppose that view)
it's not for newbies and possibly not even for seasoned
programmers unless one has a certain combination of mindset,
needs and capabilities.
It might be helpful for you to ask some questions beyond the
language itself. After all it's not about the language itself
only but also about the environment, the available tools, etc.
One example is comfort (as in "find one click installation sets
for Win/Apple/Linux/*BSD/Solaris in the Download section").
Another (somewhat sad for D) example is your needs for a
development environment. There seems to be a rule of thumb that
says that major and well established languages offer complete,
even luxurious, IDE support for all major OSs while less well
established and mature languages might offer not much more than
"Emacs is supported and there is some half cooked Eclipse and
Code:Blocks support" which might be a prohibitively large hurdle
for a beginner.
Yet another issue is libraries. A newbie might be better served
with, say, FreePascal or Python which both have a nice set of
batteries included.
If I were to put D into one single sentence (beware! I'm a D
newbie myself) it would be "C/C++ done right and with a major
focus on systems programming".
For some people (like ourselves here) D's capabilities and
potential are well worth to be patient, to contribute to it (and
it's environment!) and D is or comes damn close to what we always
wanted.
One point that might make D somewhat less attractive for CS
students is the fact (well, according to my impression) that one
doesn't care that much about concepts around here but rather
about performance and somehow hacking it to work.
In any case it will be hard for you to decide - and for us to
helpfully advise - without you considering/telling us somewhat
more about your needs.
On a somewhat private sidenote: I value Pike highly and I had a
closer look at Go but don't consider it highly in any regard.
Frankly, my impression was "lots of exitement and hype and some
nice gadgets but rather insignificant (no matter how many fans it
attracts).
In case you decide to stay with D or to at least test it somewhat
more extensively, you should definitely get the book "The D
Programming Language" by Andrei Alexandrescu, one of the major D
figures and a major contributor to D.
Have a look at the wiki and at the D.learn forum!
