I thoroughly enjoyed reading this thread. I don't have much
experience with Go, but for a quick project, my goto language is
typically Python. However, there are definitely areas that Python
can be frustrating (where you have to have a loop, parallel
processing). I would view D as an ideal language to complement
Python's downsides.
As a frequent user of R and the various scientific Python
libraries, I found myself agreeing a lot with Russell's comments,
particularly that idea of getting D in Jupyter. To me, the
infrastructure/community of R or Python is the biggest benefit of
those languages. My work is typically at a high enough level that
it just doesn't make sense to re-invent the wheel on a lot of
things. I don't have the programming knowledge to do something
like get armadillo or nlopt or MC Stan to work in D. Tools, like
Calypso, that would make it easier to get C++ libraries working
would be very important in using D more. I've looked at the
source code to a few of those libraries and they look
sufficiently complicated that it puts me off the idea of trying
to get any of them working myself.
In addition, further development of the ability to call D from R
or Python* or Julia (or vice-versa) would also be a positive.
One point that has been discussed thoroughly was learning D from
the website. The book is a much better resource than the
reference materials on the website for learning D. For instance,
if I google d language classes, it takes me to the reference
page, which is too confusing for a beginner to the D language.
I've learned a lot from it, but it is very hard to make much
headway without having read the books section on classes first.
Improving tutorials and examples might go a long way. Moreover,
quality of tutorials and examples would also be very helpful in
terms of getting C/C++ libraries to work and calling code in
other languages. The Interfacing to C page in the reference
materials is written at a sufficiently high level that I'm still
not confident I understand it well enough to use it myself.
*When I google pyd python d language, it takes me to an old link
at dsource.org that requires two jumps before hitting a github
page with the more recent version of the project (new release 3
days ago!). However, that page doesn't really give you much
information about how to use it or anything else.
