On Friday, 20 November 2015 at 16:39:52 UTC, Chris Wright wrote:
On Fri, 20 Nov 2015 14:41:04 +0000, Chris wrote:
Yep, what can one say.
1. Who goes to the language reference, when they want to
_learn_ a language?
It's the obvious place if you're familiar with other
programming languages. Tutorials tend to be geared toward
people who have little to no programming experience, who view
learning a new language (even in a paradigm they're used to) as
a large thing.
We were all there once, but we're not all there now. When I
learn a new language, I want typically 20-30 lines of example
code and a language reference. I can start writing code after
reading a short example, and I can use the language reference
to fill in the remaining gaps. The language reference is
usually both denser and better categorized for my needs.
2. If you really want to learn a language, you will learn it.
There are enough resources for D now, there's room for
improvement, but there always is.
I was choosing between programming languages a while ago, most
of which I hadn't used before. For each of them, it wasn't the
case that I wanted to learn them, but I knew I probably wanted
to use one of them.
If any of them were as obtuse to learn as D, I would have
skipped past them post haste.
If I'm evaluating a programming language to start using at
work, I will evaluate it on how easy it is for me to accomplish
things in that language and how easy it will be for my
coworkers to start using the language. My coworkers mostly know
Ruby and are just tentatively switching to Java. Moving to
Haskell probably isn't an option despite the existence of
decent tutorials, but D is similar enough that they could learn
-- assuming there are good tutorials readily available.
I know, catering for the "one second attention span" crowd is
a recipe for success, if you deal with PHP or JS. But D is not
in that league. Even if you cater for them, they will soon be
frustrated anyway, because for D you'll need a deeper
understanding of things, sooner or later.
You were contemptuous toward PHP and JavaScript, and now you
are being contemptuous toward people who are potentially
interested in learning D. Please be more respectful.
Have you been able to learn D? Yes or no? I'm sorry, if I'm not
always politically correct and I'm the first one to understand
the needs of programming novices, because we've all been there
(as you pointed out). My point is that for D you will need a
deeper understanding of things, and Ali's book provides this. D
is not like Javscript where type "alert('Hello, world!');" and go
"Yeah!". One cannot always blame D and its community for mistakes
and/or bad choices people make.
