On Sunday, 1 September 2013 at 18:43:05 UTC, Ramon wrote:
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.
I agree. D tries to be all things for all programmers, hence the
recent thread about whether D is the language for both high-level
and performance programming, but there's only a small group of
people who would even know how to exercise all those
capabilities. Newbies like john probably get overwhelmed by the
complexity. For example, slices are always talked about as a
great feature in D, but most programmers don't understand
pointers: they're not going to get slices either. The hardcore
users are just going to use whatever is the entrenched standard,
that's C++.
That leaves D in a never-never land for mass usage: too complex
for newbies, too niche for those who want to get serious work
done. I think D can break out of this trap to some extent and do
very well, but it's a hard problem to solve. I will say that
I've never had installation problems with D, but I've never tried
to use it on a Mac either.
The key is probably getting some popular apps built in D, where
the developers rave about how D helped them get their work done
better and faster. I am not aware of such design wins for D yet,
but I hope and believe they will be there someday.
