On Friday, 23 January 2015 at 17:03:17 UTC, aldanor wrote:
1) D Learning
This is the most problematic part. It's not even obvious where
to start.
Say I just landed on dlang.org via a google search and I want
to find a quick user guide. I click D Reference (that seems the
closest one to "beginner's guide" out of all options) and I see
an "Introduction" page. Ok, looks promising, what do we have
there... Ouch, Phases of Compilation, that went wrong fast.
Let's try the next one, Lexical. Ouch, wall of text composed of
ascii characters, unicode escapes and all other boring things.
Let's go back to Books & Articles. Now, Ali's book is sure very
nice, but it's way overly detailed for introduction as it's
trying to miss a single thing (which is sure a good thing! ...
that is, if you actually decide on reading a BOOK in a first
place). Plus, it's not on dlang.org so it doesn't feel
"official". Going back to more books, we see some 5-7 year old
books, some very recent ones (but not free), and a few
tutorials on a specific areas (like Philip's) -- again, nothing
really qualifies as an introduction guide. This section is
definitely more well-suited for intermediate D programmers who
already know what they want to learn.
Books & Articles -> Howtos (is that a book or an article?).
This links to a wiki.dlang.org (yet another site?..) where we
have an unorganized mess of links. Some of them sound useful
but it's unlikely we are interested in voldemort types or
unittest placement yet. In fact, I've just found out there's a
bunch of information on wiki that I see myself for the first
time -- if it took me several years, how long will it take a
newcomer? It would be nice to move the best/finalized bits and
examples into a sort of a "D by Example" official section on
the website. Wiki is useful as a collaborative sandbox or a
staging area, but it's fugly, feels foreign and not so nice for
reading.
... that's all. At this point the disgruntled newbie closes the
dlang.org website and goes on learning himself some Rust.
[NB] SUGGESTION: initiate work on an Official Guide and keep it
up to date with the latest language features. It could even be
largely a copy-paste from Ali's book and TDPL (upon Ali's and
Andrei's permission), omitting unnecessary details (and rather
pointing at a specific places in documentation where additional
information could be found) and written in a friendly manner
with a human touch. I think it's much simpler than it sounds if
we do it collaboratively and it doesn't have to be
feature-complete before released. If we choose to do it, it may
be best to keep it in a separate github repo in order to make
it easier to compile separately without having to compile
dmd/druntime/etc.
Optionally, but highly suggested: initiate work on D by
Example: a searchable collection of up-to-date self-documenting
D examples, structured by the topic, like a book. Some of the
examples from wiki could be moved there, some Rosetta examples
by bearophile and many more. Could be even parts of some
libraries or Phobos. The point is, we have more than we need,
it's just scattered across the Internet, so we need to
unscatter it.
I have a basic suggestion on how to get started. Create a
"Learning D" button and put it on the menu at left on the front
page. On the page it links to, start by researching and listing
every existing resource for learning D, in a "kitchen sink" kind
of way. Now future contributors can know what already exists, and
what doesn't. The importance of this list is that anyone wanting
to help create new teaching aids can quickly get up to speed on
the current state of affairs. They can feel assured that they're
not duplicating anyone else's work. As the official list and
accessible from the front page, it's more likely to be kept up to
date. The point is that it serves double duty both as a treasure
trove of learning links, and as a complete reference for future
contributors. Destroy, please!
