What can be done to capture the attention of young people in the developing world?

Probably the most effective thing would be if it were possible to edit, compile, and run D programs on a cheap Android ARM phone.

Is this within the bounds of possibility?

There are millions of unemployed, bored, restless, and ambitious young men out there, who have saved their all to buy a cheap smartphone.

Any other ideas?

Steve

On Monday, 10 February 2014 at 18:11:38 UTC, Steve Teale wrote:
> What can be done to capture the attention of young people in the developing world?
>
> Probably the most effective thing would be if it were possible to edit, compile, and run D programs on a cheap Android ARM phone.
>
> Is this within the bounds of possibility?
>
> There are millions of unemployed, bored, restless, and ambitious young men out there, who have saved their all to buy a cheap smartphone.
>
> Any other ideas?
>
> Steve

A D compiler that targets JVM or Dalvik directly is my personal dream...

On Monday, 10 February 2014 at 18:11:38 UTC, Steve Teale wrote:
> What can be done to capture the attention of young people in the developing world?
>
> Probably the most effective thing would be if it were possible to edit, compile, and run D programs on a cheap Android ARM phone.
>
> Is this within the bounds of possibility?
>
> There are millions of unemployed, bored, restless, and ambitious young men out there, who have saved their all to buy a cheap smartphone.
>
> Any other ideas?
>
> Steve

I am only 20 and am still in university so I feel like I can answer this with at least my own experiences. Personally I think D would capture the attention of more young people if it was simply easier to use. The first "real" language I really got into was C#(about 5-6 years ago) and I think the main reason is that it was so flipin easy to learn and get started. All I had to do to set it up was download Visual Studio and I was done... period ... The documentation was fantastic and everything was named in very intuitive ways. Most of the time when I was learning I would just ctrl+space and start scrolling through the auto-complete reading the documentation of all the functions right there in visual studio. It was soooooo easy. In my opinion the biggest thing holding D back by a long shot is the tooling and documentation... it is simply terrible. But thats just my opinion so I don't want anyone taking offense.

Also something that would help get younger people into D was if the std lib was a little bit more expansive. Look at java and c# in my opinion they are both so popular because their std lib is so large. Younger people don't like to have to deal with non standard libraries as they just make it so much more difficult to do things especially as they are still trying to learn.

The lack of a real GUI library is also a hindrance. Young people like to see results on the screen other than just text. That is why web and mobile development is so popular with young people.

tldr; Tools suck, documentation sucks, std lib is small and no std GUI lib...

On Monday, 10 February 2014 at 19:03:22 UTC, Tofu Ninja wrote:
> tldr; Tools suck, documentation sucks, std lib is small and no std GUI lib...

I do agree to a certain degree.
std lib is not really that small, but sure it is never enough.
Lack of std GUI lib, I honestly I'm perfectly fine with it.
Tools on the other hand, do suck. The only way I could debug my prototype code involving std.concurrency and some OpenGL code was learning to use GDB from the command line, because GUI debuggers would fail horribly. Editors are so-so, compiler-as-a-library needs some extra time before work on it starts.

Documentation is just not good enough. Perhaps I can start doing some pulls for the docs, since I'm still a n00b of the language but at least not a complete beginner anymore.

Thanks God we have at least DUB.
BTW: we really need to get a BIG link to dub package registry in the home page, or at least on the side bar.

On Monday, 10 February 2014 at 18:14:26 UTC, Dejan Lekic wrote:
> A D compiler that targets JVM or Dalvik directly is my personal dream...

Mine too!

On Monday, 10 February 2014 at 18:11:38 UTC, Steve Teale wrote:
> What can be done to capture the attention of young people in the developing world?
>
> Probably the most effective thing would be if it were possible to edit, compile, and run D programs on a cheap Android ARM phone.
>
> Is this within the bounds of possibility?
>
> There are millions of unemployed, bored, restless, and ambitious young men out there, who have saved their all to buy a cheap smartphone.
>
> Any other ideas?
>
> Steve

Don't forget the young women :)
But yes, good ARM and android support would be awesome, although native code isn't exactly something that's heavily encouraged on android unfortunately.

As an aside: Africa is heavily dominated by smartphones, due to the relative ease of building a mobile infrastructure v.s. a landline based model, as well as good resilience to poor/unreliable power supply.

On Mon, 10 Feb 2014 11:03:19 -0800, Tofu Ninja <emmons0@purdue.edu> wrote:

> On Monday, 10 February 2014 at 18:11:38 UTC, Steve Teale wrote:
>> What can be done to capture the attention of young people in the developing world?
>>
>> Probably the most effective thing would be if it were possible to edit, compile, and run D programs on a cheap Android ARM phone.
>>
>> Is this within the bounds of possibility?
>>
>> There are millions of unemployed, bored, restless, and ambitious young men out there, who have saved their all to buy a cheap smartphone.
>>
>> Any other ideas?
>>
>> Steve
>
> I am only 20 and am still in university so I feel like I can answer this with at least my own experiences. Personally I think D would capture the attention of more young people if it was simply easier to use. The first "real" language I really got into was C#(about 5-6 years ago) and I think the main reason is that it was so flipin easy to learn and get started. All I had to do to set it up was download Visual Studio and I was done... period ... The documentation was fantastic and everything was named in very intuitive ways. Most of the time when I was learning I would just ctrl+space and start scrolling through the auto-complete reading the documentation of all the functions right there in visual studio. It was soooooo easy. In my opinion the biggest thing holding D back by a long shot is the tooling and documentation... it is simply terrible. But thats just my opinion so I don't want anyone taking offense.
>
> Also something that would help get younger people into D was if the std lib was a little bit more expansive. Look at java and c# in my opinion they are both so popular because their std lib is so large. Younger people don't like to have to deal with non standard libraries as they just make it so much more difficult to do things especially as they are still trying to learn.
>
> The lack of a real GUI library is also a hindrance. Young people like to see results on the screen other than just text. That is why web and mobile development is so popular with young people.
>
> tldr; Tools suck, documentation sucks, std lib is small and no std GUI lib...

I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment, although I am a little older and got my start in a combination of VB6 and C++98. But C# is what made me want to get up everyday and write code. It is fantastically easy to learn, you can write code that does useful things very quickly. Download the IDE, install, write 50 lines and you've got a tool that does useful work, even if trivial.

And the .NET Framework or Java Frameworks. I know that the linux-heads scoff at the idea of shipping a large standard library, "Download the library that works best for you" they cry! Well, that answer is unacceptable for newbies, mostly because they don't actually know which library will work for them, or with D, or on the operating system they are using. Big standard libraries provide a new user with all the tools that they need to write many programs. This isn't to say that the standard library needs to include everything one might need to build any app every. I still use third-party libraries. I just don't use them to fill in common functionality. For example, I have a library that provides special types of inputboxes, but WPF (a big part of the .NET Framework) provides a generic inputbox. Then we use EntityFramework, .NET provides the generic interface that is used by EntityFramework, LINQ, but EF itself extends the framework in specialized ways. The framework should absolutely include as many general tools as possible.

Not having an IDE is more tangential, but no less important. Here we have two integrations with popular IDE's, Visual Studio and Mono. However, these integrations suffer from the lack of tooling for D. DMD can't be used as libary, so these integrations have had to produce their own parsing engines and they are always behind DMD itself so they never parse the current DMD language quite correctly. This means that you can't turn on the really cool features that we in the C#/Java community have become used to. D's integration with IDE's is similar to the situation with IDE integration for C++. Yes D is easier to parse than C++, but since we can't use the canonical parser, we don't have any parsers that match D in it's current form so the AST's are almost always broken or plain incorrect.

Building a new IDE won't solve this problem. Here we need to focus on building better tools for D, turning DMD itself into a library or Compiler-as-a-Service in the current lingo, since libraries are now "services". D needs to make great strides in tooling to be relevant, we need first-class debugging, and they need to support more than the terminal. We need D as library, we need better IDE integrations. We need a broader standard library. We need more bindings for existing libraries. We need more new libraries (like the Aurora library I am working on).

But most importantly we need to stop whining about the problems and start doing something about them. There are plenty of projects in these areas that are being run by a single person that could use any help. For example, I know that Rainer Schutze of VisualD fame is quite open to pull requests. If you use a library from a language other than D and have a D binding for it, get it in Deimos.

Let's all do something that moves the state of D forward.

-- 
Adam Wilson
GitHub/IRC: LightBender
Aurora Project Coordinator

On Monday, 10 February 2014 at 18:11:38 UTC, Steve Teale wrote:
> What can be done to capture the attention of young people in the developing world?

What young people and how young exactly? It is a very varying crowd..

On Monday, 10 February 2014 at 20:32:03 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
> I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment, although I am a little older and got my start in a combination of VB6 and C++98.

Same for me when I first started learning to program. I did a VB6 course in highschool, followed by a Java course, as well as teaching myself C++ on my own to hack on my Nintendo DS. Looking back, good tutorials were the biggest help. I didn't know anything about anything, and I don't know if I would ever have been able to figure out C++ without sites like cplusplus.com. Bartosz Milewski's C++ in Action book was a huge help too. I'm glad he decided to publish it for free on the web.

> And the .NET Framework or Java Frameworks. I know that the linux-heads scoff at the idea of shipping a large standard library, "Download the library that works best for you" they cry! Well, that answer is unacceptable for newbies, mostly because they don't actually know which library will work for them, or with D, or on the operating system they are using. Big standard libraries provide a new user with all the tools that they need to write many programs. This isn't to say that the standard library needs to include everything one might need to build any app every. I still use third-party libraries. I just don't use them to fill in common functionality. For example, I have a library that provides special types of inputboxes, but WPF (a big part of the .NET Framework) provides a generic inputbox. Then we use EntityFramework, .NET provides the generic interface that is used by EntityFramework, LINQ, but EF itself extends the framework in specialized ways. The framework should absolutely include as many general tools as possible.

I absolutely agree with that. Phobos should strive to be as "batteries included" as possible while minimizing (ideally eliminating) third party dependencies.

> Building a new IDE won't solve this problem. Here we need to focus on building better tools for D, turning DMD itself into a library or Compiler-as-a-Service in the current lingo, since libraries are now "services". D needs to make great strides in tooling to be relevant, we need first-class debugging, and they need to support more than the terminal. We need D as library, we need better IDE integrations. We need a broader standard library. We need more bindings for existing libraries. We need more new libraries (like the Aurora library I am working on).
>
> But most importantly we need to stop whining about the problems and start doing something about them. There are plenty of projects in these areas that are being run by a single person that could use any help. For example, I know that Rainer Schutze of VisualD fame is quite open to pull requests. If you use a library from a language other than D and have a D binding for it, get it in Deimos.

I've come to agree that good IDE integration is a must. I use C# at work, and Visual Studio makes refactoring and code generation near-effortless. I agree with Walter that we definitely shouldn't need an IDE to use D, but there is no competition when it comes to the productivity that a good IDE enables.

On Monday, 10 February 2014 at 19:40:46 UTC, MattCoder wrote:
> On Monday, 10 February 2014 at 18:14:26 UTC, Dejan Lekic wrote:
>> A D compiler that targets JVM or Dalvik directly is my personal dream...
>
> Mine too!

Same here. Mobile platforms are immensely important. If you can't cater for them, people will soon ask questions (users don't understand why xyz is not available for mobiles, and they don't need to). So the lack of support for ARM and the like is really a big big drawback.
One of the applications we are developing will need a web based solution for mobile phones, tablets etc. It would be nicer, and users will finally want an app they can install locally without having to refer to the "cloud" (mind you, the network is not always available).
I think the importance of this cannot be underestimated, and coming back to the point, this will put young people off, because a lot of young people are into (mobile) app development.