On Wednesday, 9 March 2016 at 16:12:08 UTC, Michael wrote:
On Sunday, 6 March 2016 at 08:40:17 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
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?
The geeky graduate students are the better target.
In teaching you usually want a focused clean language related
to the course or a language that is already adopted by
industry.
clip
Postgraduates, on the other hand, often have more time to
experiment, and due to the nature of postgraduate work
(particularly Ph.D and beyond) their research tends to require
novelty. D has proved very valuable for me during my research
and the lack of library requirements for experiments to be
written and tested means that I am not tied to using a
particular language. I am of course not saying that we
shouldn't try to encourage undergraduates to explore D, but
it's very difficult to try and introduce a new language into
the curriculum at most universities without a rather large
volume of support and justifications for doing so. Just some
thoughts.
I may be way off-base here but would teaching assembly be a good
way
to get D into the hands of undergrads? Learning assembly requires
some sort of 'harness' to code your assembly in. The few such
tools (NASM) are, by my memory, rather painful to work with.
Could using DMDs inline assembler allow for a clean way of
learning assembly
I say this as someone who never took a proper assembly course as
an undergrad (we used a simulated/simple assembly lanaguage).
I've since tried to learn Intel assembly with NASM or something
similar, but had limited time and got frustrated with the tools.
