On Friday, 4 May 2018 at 12:00:43 UTC, Sjoerd Nijboer wrote:
Instead it would offer teachers who are looking for new new teaching material some material that is closely coupled to other material with a small set of technologies. Thus not forcing students to learn a new language every other course. I hope that that would invite teachers to use D as a language for learning.
This is key. I don't know how much adoption there would be, but free, professional-quality teaching materials would make it much easier to adopt.
One way that I could see D getting its foot in the door is an intro course using Java or Python but where the instructor wants to devote a couple of lectures to low-level programming using pointers. D would be perfect for that due to the convenient syntax. Other topics like metaprogramming or memory management would also be reasons to use D.
I don't think the lack of industry usage is anywhere close to the problem posed by lack of teaching materials and instructor knowledge. After all, Scheme was widely used for decades, and in some places is still is.
