On Wednesday, 18 March 2015 at 16:26:44 UTC, Bayan Rafeh wrote:
I don't think I've ever enjoyed programming as much as I did with D. Anything that I needed to do was doable. It's only been a few months programming with it and already I feel very comfortable using it.
I'm with you. Although Guile Scheme is still my favorite language, working with D has been the most fun I've had with a programming language, and I've tried dozens of languages over a period of almost thirty years.
It's only when I actually started seriously programming with it that I actually got a feel for it's features and how they were supposed to be used. This is where it differs from Go as far as I can tell from this thread. I learned D just by doing what I wanted to do in it, and looking up any features I needed or wanted when I wanted to use, and 99 times out of 100 I found them.
Same for me. When using C, I find myself saying, "I want to do X" for many different values of X. There's always a reason you can't do X. In D I start with the assumption that I can do anything that comes to mind. When using Go, there's a lot of stuff you can't do, but there's only one reason you can't do it. Because the Go team thinks anyone wanting do it doesn't know how to program.
This should be how D is sold. It has a higher learning curve than Go or Python, but in the end you can use it in a style you're comfortable with whether you come from C, Java, Haskell, Lisp, whatever.
I would characterize it more as a longer learning curve than a higher learning curve. It's not like C++ where you have to master so much complicated sh*t in order to use the language. One of the first things I was told to do when I started with C++ was learn Boost. Bjarne Stroustrup has complained that Boost is excessively complicated, and a beginner's supposed to learn it? You don't get that with D. It was probably six months before I even bothered to learn D's templates. I have seen so many times "big language" and "complicated language" used interchangeably wrt D. It's a big language but not a complicated one IMO.
