On Monday, 16 March 2015 at 08:54:20 UTC, Joakim wrote:
Similarly, D's never going to do very well with programmers who don't care about the efficiency of their code: simpler, slower languages like python or ruby have that niche sewn up. The best we can do is point out that if you're already here for the advanced features, it can also be used for scripting and the like. And of course, we should always strive to make things as easy as we can for both small and large projects, including better documentation.
I don't necessarily agree with that. I'd say Python and Ruby will dominate among programmers that don't care about efficiency *and* are writing simple scripts. Ruby's my go-to language for writing small scripts to manipulate a little text or to move some files around. D is just a better language once you get into bigger tasks.
With respect to scripting, I see the main documentation problem being one of examples. You shouldn't have to understand how templates work in order to write a script. Documentation related to ranges is a big offender. Ranges are used all over the language, yet there's no way the average Joe is going to figure out how to use functions that return a range, and there's no reason it should be that way. I once proposed a ban on auto as a return type in documentation examples and the response was that you should know how to use the language before reading the documentation.
