On Sunday, 6 March 2016 at 17:53:23 UTC, Seb wrote:
On Sunday, 6 March 2016 at 07:38:01 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
Motivated by Dmitry's "Pitching D to a gang of Gophers"
thread, how about pitching it to a gang of professors and
graduate students?
If you want D to flourish, you should _really_ focus on this.
Many CS students usually learn only one or two language at
university.
I think this can be one of the selling points. In general,
languages aren't the teaching goal of a university.
Python/Java - These get chosen for early courses. Python likely
because of its strict formatting (get people used to formatting
code), the language is high level and has rich collection of
libraries. Both of the languages prevent worrying about a lot of
other details (memory, procedural is easy to explain)
C/C++ - These come into later classes, I'd guess because they are
used in industry and have unique usage requirements (null
pointers, double free)
Otherwise courses seem to expect you know one language
(java/python) and try to teach you concepts within that language,
and sometimes allow you to do the homework in any language.
I think D is the right choice because it can demonstrate concepts
while provide the advantages of why other languages are chosen.
And it has a very nice set of toys that many students will enjoy
playing with and using in their homework. It makes a good
learning language because it makes a good using language.
