October 16, 2017
On Friday, 13 October 2017 at 13:14:39 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> I don't know what the expectations of a Windows user are.

In my exprience 80% of mainly Windows devs (in professional environment) use Visual Studio + plugins (e.g. Visual Assist/Dpack etc.). Most of the remaining 20% use Visual Studio with vim keybindings/emulation or they code with vim/emacs, but use Visual Studio for debugging. And the last 2% use something completely different.

I think Visual Studio is the professional standard for C/C++/C# on Windows (as in Windows is the main platform and not some bad port hacked on top of cygwin). Basically what Xcode is for Mac.

October 18, 2017
On Friday, 13 October 2017 at 06:58:10 UTC, Peter R wrote:
> If I, as a new user, don't have a solid first impression, I'd have no expectation that the rest of the D ecosystem is polished, and I would return to C++
>

But the D 'ecosystem' is *not* polished. It's an evolving work in progress, mostly driven by volunteers, and little or no commercial backing.

Even the language and its library are evolving...(although both are pretty shiny already). Also mostly driven by volunteers.

Information is scarce....I can find at most, 1/2 a dozen or so books on the D language. It too is a work in progress..

Until a month ago, I had never heard of D (and I have 20+ year in the I.T sector).

Compare D to other established langauges...and your gunna be disappointed (in some areas more than others, and some not so much).

New users approaching D, (whether they are experienced developers or not) need to have the right expectations to begin with. I think that is where work needs to go - managing expectations.

D is like playing footy on the playground....you just never know what's going to happen. But it should be fun nonetheless. D is not like playing footy in the AFL (hey..I'm from Australia).. i.e. D is not in the big league yet, and does not have all the stuff needed to play in the big league - rules and regulations, support teams, corporate backing, advertisement, millions of fans, etc....etc....

D needs a hero ( a kinda 'Borland' for 21st century) - to take up the mantle...but the business case still needs to be worked out...as it's not all that clear what it might be at the moment...

until then, it's open-source/volunteer driven..and you need to set your expectations accordingly.

October 18, 2017
On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 08:56:21 UTC, Rion wrote:
> On Sunday, 15 October 2017 at 20:27:35 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
>> D is much less gratifying than other languages for most people.
>>  Just like Windows was more gratifying than Linux for most people in 2000.  And I suppose that's likely to change slowly, but continue to be the case for a while so long as people working on Windows don't notice when something isn't working and fix things at root cause.  It's usually not that much more difficult to do so than work around it, and it usually pays off even considered selfishly.
>>
>> I can appreciate your frustration, but considering how many years knowing a programming language can pay off for, a few hundred hours spent to learn something new isn't that much.  That's like a couple of months full-time and if it works out the payback period should easily be a year.  Viewed rationally, that's a pretty good return on investment compared to most other opportunities available.
>>
>> In a world where there are lots of smart people and knowledge is widely available, the barriers to opportunity (there must be barriers, otherwise the opportunity would be competed away) are often emotional ones.  So I like things where the difficulty is front-loaded, because they tend to be neglected by modern people who are used to quick gratification.  And whilst it surely can be frustrating, the situation is already better both on Windows and as regards documentation and tooling than it was in 2014.  It's not difficult to make little changes towards what one would like to see oneself.
>
> When you invest this time into a language, you have expectations. A person expects for a language this old, that every puzzle fits together without issue.
>
> Call me spoiled if you want but quick gratification it is not. The time wasted on dealing with issue on D, is time you can have spend in a different language actually writing code/testing. Its a barrier to the language its own success when its not as user friendly as the other languages.
>
> If a person needs to do a action in Windows and it takes him 5 mouse clicks. But hey, under Linux you can do it with one command line arg, ... the Linux approach sound more easy right? Until you add the time needed to learn the command and assuming there are no issues. What is more rewarding or punishing? There is a reason that Windows is still so popular. Windows does not get in the way. It just keep working. Can it be improved, yes! MS puts a massive amount of time and money in there testing. And it shows in there platform.
>
> Its the same reason why Linux as a desktop OS will never work out. Too much puzzle pieces that do not fit, too much assumed that people need ( and have the time ) to learn the complicated way. A lack of inter-testing beyond just the basic compile tests ( i mean really usage ).
>
> Its easy to see the same attitude in D as a community project. There are GREAT pieces being written but everybody is working more as a solo developer, with no clear guideline. That is the big difference between a language like D and corporate backed languages.
>
> I can easily think of a dozen extensions to D, that need to be part of the standard library or extended library of D, like DCompute, mir-algorithm, ...
>
> Why? Because its again lose projects that you as a end consumer need to discover. Most of the time written and maintained by one person. Too much here is so single person focused, that its hard to see people continue the work if that person has no more time.
>
> Too much here is single issue focused and it shows in the developers there background, what results in the testing of platforms, the interaction etc.
>
> Maybe i explain this badly, but D seems has a lot of issues that people here are not aware off because they are already in the D mindset. And its those issues that show up the most, when one first tries this language.

Once again what you say confirm what I'm repeating all the time : D hasn't enough the "plug-n-play" mindset.

The current view is elitist : "D needs some investment blablabla".

The sad result is that NONE of my friend have liked their first experience with D.

Really. NONE of them.

Despite they said initially that it "looks interesting".

The website should be more clear and make a choice "by default".

1/ install DMD (or ...)
2/ install CoEdit (or ...)

You should say to the beginners how to install what will work most of the time, and bring the less annoyance. While giving them other options too, but the simplest main path to success should be obvious.

CoEdit, along with DMD, gets the job done.

Maybe it's not the sexiest IDE, but it works very well for "beginners" scripts.

You create an empty file, you type your code, you ask to run it.

If there are errors, it's ergonomic too.

And for "power users", indeed, there are PLENTY of opportunities, in PLENTY of environments.

But D NEEDS a DEFAULT IDE, something that should even be pre-installed by the DMD compiler installer, if the user doesn't "uncheck" the installation option.

Again, marketing errors.

Make D MORE EASY for BEGINNERS.

And by beginners, as you know me, I mean scripters, who come from JavaScript, Python, Ruby.

I know that at the moment they may not be much, considering the website which obviously targets C++/Rust-like developers.

But I still think it's an error.

Put D on the "easy to pick up" road. It's where it should be. Because D IS EASY to learn. And it's also EASY to use.

But make the installation and learning curve as smooth as possible for less-skilled developers, by allowing them to download an all-in-one bundled installer (compiler+ide+tutorials+examples), and they will be much more to join the D community !

They have their place here too, so be more welcoming with them.

Because you may think it's already the case, but you should trust Rion and the others when they say it's not really the case, especially on windows.
October 19, 2017
On Wednesday, 18 October 2017 at 18:02:24 UTC, Ecstatic Coder wrote:
>
> But make the installation and learning curve as smooth as possible for less-skilled developers, by allowing them to download an all-in-one bundled installer (compiler+ide+tutorials+examples), and they will be much more to join the D community !
>
> Because you may think it's already the case, but you should trust Rion and the others when they say it's not really the case, especially on windows.

don't take my response too seriously...but...

The open-source community is mostly driven by 'volunteers'...who work on what they want to work on, when they have some spare time to work on it. I think too many people do not understand this, and so come in with bloated expectations.

Unlike commerical developers, the open source community rarely has the money or the resources for the 'all-in-one bundled' mindset. That's just how it is. That is the starting point for your expecations.

I blame commerical developers, like Microsoft/Apple, and universities especially!

They go out of their way to make the 'installation and learning curve as smooth as possible'..for beginners! And they are responsible for setting those kind of expectations up in peoples minds..at the 'beginning'! This is not the mindset you want when you enter the open source community...

I guess this is ok, if you're only every going to encounter commercial solutions when you go out into the real world...but the world has changed a lot..and you're actually more likely to encounter non-commercial, open source software these days.

So perhaps they should start teaching undergrad's how to setup an open-source operating system (preferably FreeBSD...Linux if you really have to..  ;-)

They should teach undergrad's to program in C/C++ (since open-source o/s's are written in these languages - though more C than C++)

They should teach undergrad's to program in a simple, plain text editor.

They should teach undergrad's to compile/debug from the command line/shell.

Instead, they teach C# on Windows, using VS.

open source, and D too, did not come about as a result of C#/Windows/VS users being disappointed with their language and/or tooling ;-)

So my recommendation for beginners, is [0..9]:

[0] - dump windows! (or at least dual boot, or setup a vm or something).
[1] - install FreeBSD (linux if you really have to ;-)
[2] - start writing some C/C++ code using Vi, and compiling from the shell prompt.
[3] - realise that there must be an easier way...
[4] - install KDE (hey..we don't want things to be too hard..do we).
[5] - dump C/C++ and install LLVM's D compiler => pkg install ldc
      (or install DMD: just download from the website and extract it)
[6] - open a 'more user friendly' text editor (like Kate).
[7] - start coding again, in D this time.
[8] - open a shell.
[9] - start compiling/debugging.

Then you *will* notice how much easier things are, and you won't be disappointed ;-)

And...you'll be better prepared to join the D community (or any other open source community for that matter).

October 19, 2017
On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 08:56:21 UTC, Rion wrote:
> When you invest this time into a language, you have expectations. A person expects for a language this old, that every puzzle fits together without issue.

I can't say that your process for forming expectations is wrong, but it's evidently not turned out to be a good guide to reality.  It could be that reality should conform itself to your view of what it should be, but it might also be that D is a thing in itself that develops according to its own intrinsic pattern that is different from the one with which some people are most familiar with today.  And if that's right, one can't evaluate it according to heuristics that fit other languages - one needs to think about what is the problem one faces, and from an enterprise value perspective how and where might D be useful.  And if one isn't in a position where one can't think about it from an enterprise value perspective, it's going to be hard to use D at work.

> Call me spoiled if you want but quick gratification it is not.

Yes - that's the whole point - it's certainly not a language community that as things stand today fits someone expecting quick gratification, especially on Windows.  I don't see how it becomes one very soon.  Expecting it to become what it is not might lead to disappointment.  For some people, perhaps that's enough for them to look elsewhere - it very much depends on your discount rate, on your patience, how quickly you pick up technical things, and on the sorts of problems you face.

Debates about languages are often really debates about values.  And although one may explore differences in values in a rational way, that's really not something one is easily going to persuade anyone else of.  Hey Javascript guys why not slow down a bit, focus on code quality, security, rigour, error reporting and so on.  It's not going to happen.

https://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/platform-as-reflection-of-values-joyent-nodejs-and-beyond
https://vimeo.com/230142234


> The time wasted on dealing with issue on D, is time you can have spend in a different language actually writing code/testing. Its a barrier to the language its own success when its not as user friendly as the other languages.

It's not the time spent sorting out build systems or writing code that is the truly expensive bit...  In fact there are days when I wonder about imposing a tax on lines of code to make people write less of it.

It might not be a positive factor, but empirically it's certainly not an overwhelming impediment to the continued growth of the language, because adoption is growing.

> If a person needs to do a action in Windows and it takes him 5 mouse clicks. But hey, under Linux you can do it with one command line arg, ... the Linux approach sound more easy right?

Yes, to me I find it so - even Microsoft at a WinOps talk recently said that in the end the command-line is better for some things because a GUI hides things from you (I paraphrase).  Of course for some people it's easier to use a mouse.  But the command-line is certainly more powerful and if you're managing or deploying to even as few as tens or more of machines, it may often be the only way.

> Until you add the time needed to learn the command and assuming there are no issues.

You only need to learn once.  And it's my impression classic command line tools change much less often than GUI app interfaces.

> What is more rewarding or punishing?

It very much depends on what sort of thing is more your cup of tea.  People are evidently quite different in their tastes, and it's a good thing too.  It's just not going to be very gratifying to go to coffee drinkers and ask why they don't appreciate the virtues of Earl Grey.  Unless you enjoy the sort of reaction you'll get.

> Windows does not get in the way.
I must beg to differ.

> MS puts a massive amount of time and money in there testing. And it shows in there platform.

So if you prefer to use their platform, there is no point expecting D to reach a similar standard in the sheer glossiness of the appearance of tools, because time and money in the D community is spent in different ways because people using D have different problems and therefore different values.  Personally I can't stand Visual Studio, but then again I don't write much for Windows.

> Its the same reason why Linux as a desktop OS will never work out. Too much puzzle pieces that do not fit, too much assumed that people need ( and have the time ) to learn the complicated way. A lack of inter-testing beyond just the basic compile tests ( i mean really usage ).

Fair enough.  I gather UNIX family has been quite successful on the desktop - the only real competitor to Windows, no?  And some say easier to use.  And GNU and UNIX derivatives dominate the mobile markets.

> Its easy to see the same attitude in D as a community project. There are GREAT pieces being written but everybody is working more as a solo developer, with no clear guideline. That is the big difference between a language like D and corporate backed languages.

I don't think it's true that 'everybody' is working as a solo developer.  There are some decent size teams working in D.  But most of them have little to no forum presence because when you're a decent size team you have bills to pay and people to manage and you can't spend much time writing messages on forums.

> I can easily think of a dozen extensions to D, that need to be part of the standard library or extended library of D, like DCompute, mir-algorithm, ...

Yes, well we sponsor mir-algorithm, and would like to sponsor dcompute too, but I haven't had any time.  And I think it would be by far premature for them to be in Phobos, because the consequence of raising the bar for quality in Phobos has been that it stifles the growth of new things.  Mir itself was originally in Phobos experimental and Ilya asked for it to be withdrawn, for that very reason.

It's good the bar has been raised for Phobos too.

It just might be an idea to create an intermediate layer of high quality projects with a degree of community support and where you know they are likely to basically work.  That's I think why D Community Hub was created, and I guess it will probably continue to grow from here:

https://github.com/dlang-community


> Why? Because its again lose projects that you as a end consumer need to discover. Most of the time written and maintained by one person. Too much here is so single person focused, that its hard to see people continue the work if that person has no more time.
>
> Too much here is single issue focused and it shows in the developers there background, what results in the testing of platforms, the interaction etc.
>

There's an old joke about hiring.

===
One day while walking downtown, a Human Resources woman was hit by a bus and was tragically killed. Her soul arrived up in heaven where she was met at the Pearly Gates by St. Peter himself.

“Welcome to Heaven,” said St. Peter. “Before you get settled in though, it seems we have a problem. You see, strangely enough, we’ve never once had an HR manager make it this far and we’re really not sure what to do with you.”

“No problem, just let me in,” said the woman.

“Well, I’d like to, but I have higher orders. What we’re going to do is let you have a day in Hell and a day in Heaven and then you can choose whichever one you want to spend an eternity in,” the Saint replied.

“Actually, I think I’ve made up my mind… I prefer to stay in Heaven.”

“Sorry, we have our rules…”

And with that St. Peter put the HR manager in an elevator and it went down-down-down to Hell. The doors opened and the HR manager found herself stepping out onto the putting green of a beautiful golf course. In the distance was a country club and standing in front of her were all her friends – fellow HR professionals that she had worked with. They were all dressed in evening gowns and cheering for her. They ran up and kissed her on both cheeks and they talked about old times. They played an excellent round of golf and at night went to the country club where she enjoyed an excellent steak and lobster dinner. She met the Devil who was actually a really nice guy (kinda cute) and she had a great time telling jokes and dancing. The HR manager was having such a good time that before she knew it, it was time to leave. Everybody shook her hand and waved goodbye as she got on the elevator. The elevator went up-up-up and opened back up at the Pearly Gates where St. Peter was waiting for her.

“Now it’s time to spend a day in Heaven” he said. So the HR manager spent the next 24 hours lounging around on the clouds and playing the harp and singing. She had a great time and before she knew it, her 24 hours were up and St. Peter came and got her.

“So, you’ve spent a day in Hell and you’ve spent a day in Heaven. Now you must choose your eternity,” he said.

===

The HR manager paused for a second and then replied, “Well, I never thought I’d say this. I mean, Heaven has been really great and all, but I think I had a better time in Hell.”

So, St. Peter escorted her to the elevator and again the HR manager went down-down-down back to Hell.

When the doors of the elevator opened she found herself standing in a desolate wasteland covered in garbage and filth. She saw her friends were dressed in rags and were picking up garbage and putting it in sacks for the evening meal. The Devil came up to her and put his arm around her and laughed at her.

“I don’t understand,” stammered the HR manager. “Yesterday I was here and there was a golf course and a country club and we ate lobster and we danced and had a great time. Now all there is a wasteland of garbage and all my friends look miserable.”

The Devil looked at her and grinned: “That’s because yesterday we were recruiting you… but today you’re staff.”

http://www.sun-gazing.com/explains-recruitment-perfectly-true-hurts/#OFZ8GL7Y7jCloAmf.99
===

> Maybe i explain this badly, but D seems has a lot of issues that people here are not aware off because they are already in the D mindset. And its those issues that show up the most, when one first tries this language.

And it's the opposite of the recruiting joke - with D the pain is upfront - I'd by far rather it were that way, because if you only discover critical things after you have written a lot of code, that's by far more expensive.

I don't think people here are oblivious.  Nothing you have said would have come us a surprise to anyone who has been around a while, and it isn't something nobody has said before.

But one can pick from the choices available to one, or the new ones one can imagine.

Things change when somebody decides to make them change, and there's nothing more powerful than writing code - at least a proof of concept - to inspire others to follow.

Outside of that, pointing out the obvious won't change anything.  And if one won't write code (or failing that, donate money or time or something) then one shouldn't expect the world to move to accommodate one's wishes.  And it's in the context where the values of the D community are different from the values of some other languages - that's a good thing, because diversity of the sort that really matters - cultural, intellectual, cognitive - does make the world a richer place.


Laeeth.


October 18, 2017
On Thursday, October 19, 2017 02:08:13 Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> There's an old joke about hiring.

I haven't heard that one before, but I've heard essentially the same joke except that it was Bill Gates who died, and it turns out that the version of Hell that he visited on the first day was the demo version.

- Jonathan M Davis

October 19, 2017
On Thursday, 19 October 2017 at 01:32:14 UTC, codephantom wrote:
> The open-source community is mostly driven by 'volunteers'...who work on what they want to work on, when they have some spare time to work on it. I think too many people do not understand this, and so come in with bloated expectations.
>
...
> They go out of their way to make the 'installation and learning curve as smooth as possible'..for beginners! And they are responsible for setting those kind of expectations up in peoples minds..at the 'beginning'! This is not the mindset you want when you enter the open source community...
>
> I guess this is ok, if you're only every going to encounter commercial solutions when you go out into the real world...but the world has changed a lot..and you're actually more likely to encounter non-commercial, open source software these days.
...
> open source, and D too, did not come about as a result of C#/Windows/VS users being disappointed with their language and/or tooling ;-)

+1

Although these days, it's not like the contribution of enterprises to open-source is nil.  In 2013 (I didn't bother to find latest stats), 80% of contributions to the kernel were from developers employed to work on it.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/175919-who-actually-develops-linux-the-answer-might-surprise-you

And of course commercial open-source software is a thing.

When I started my career after university at SBC Warburg, banks outsourcing technology services was just beginning.  And I read a study from a couple years back about the consequences of outsourcing - and it said that very often there was a one-shot reduction in cost, followed by an enduring loss in productivity growth.  Why?  Because it's very hard to improve things when you don't control the whole process and when you don't receive information from the environment by getting your hands dirty.

And outsourcing and using tools that do everything for you automagically are somewhat similar in that respect.  Of course it's worth automating what no human should be doing.  But if one completely loses touch with the layer beneath, that comes at a high price.  And when you've automated everything, you may also find that the remaining problems are beyond the ken of any living human to solve, particularly when that human no longer has the experience of solving the simpler problems that are now automated.

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2841313

Developments in society move in cycles and waves.  From the 1990s until recently, yes, it made sense to think about making things easy that should be easy.  Today, we've lost a bit touch with the underlying reality, and as far as I can see the pendulum is swinging back a bit.

I just hired someone to work on devops who liked the old ThinkPad keyboards and didn't like the new ones.  But the old machines are now a bit dated, and yet there is no way to buy the new machines with a classic keyboard.  So he tried plugging an old keyboard in and it didn't work, so he did what anyone normal would do.  He reverse engineered the firmware and patched it - only to patch it he also had to reverse engineering the patching tool because it was signed.  Some might say that this demonstrates nothing more than a lack of pragmatism and commercial orientation.  But I don't think that's the case at all.  It's an unreasonable stance to take, but one that's very sane indeed.  GK Chesterton said that 'all progress comes from the unreasonable man'.  And if you have this kind of attitude then you recognise that you can change things in your environment - one no longer has this feeling of learned helplessness the moment that it is necessary to do something that can't be easily accomplished from within Visual Studio.  It's just code, after all.

And we're in an age where some of the most significant commercial problems come from the dynamic business environment - where you end up having to do something you didn't plan for - and from the complexity created by layers of abstractions.  So if you're adaptable and not afraid of understanding the things you depend on, and if they are themselves designed for you to take apart and understand, there's just a chance it may be one source of enduring commercial advantage...
October 19, 2017
On Thursday, 19 October 2017 at 02:08:13 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
>> I can easily think of a dozen extensions to D, that need to be part of the standard library or extended library of D, like DCompute, mir-algorithm, ...
>
> Yes, well we sponsor mir-algorithm, and would like to sponsor dcompute too, but I haven't had any time.  And I think it would be by far premature for them to be in Phobos, because the consequence of raising the bar for quality in Phobos has been that it stifles the growth of new things.  Mir itself was originally in Phobos experimental and Ilya asked for it to be withdrawn, for that very reason.
>

The situation is similar for DCompute with the added constraint that it works exclusively with LDC and has only very recently reached a state of being usable. Development is sporadic due to my available time.

Laeeth, I'll be quite busy for the next couple of weeks so there's no need to hurry.
October 19, 2017
On Thursday, 19 October 2017 at 01:32:14 UTC, codephantom wrote:
> On Wednesday, 18 October 2017 at 18:02:24 UTC, Ecstatic Coder wrote:
>>
>> But make the installation and learning curve as smooth as possible for less-skilled developers, by allowing them to download an all-in-one bundled installer (compiler+ide+tutorials+examples), and they will be much more to join the D community !
>>
>> Because you may think it's already the case, but you should trust Rion and the others when they say it's not really the case, especially on windows.
>
> don't take my response too seriously...but...
>
> The open-source community is mostly driven by 'volunteers'...who work on what they want to work on, when they have some spare time to work on it. I think too many people do not understand this, and so come in with bloated expectations.
>
> Unlike commerical developers, the open source community rarely has the money or the resources for the 'all-in-one bundled' mindset. That's just how it is. That is the starting point for your expecations.
>
> I blame commerical developers, like Microsoft/Apple, and universities especially!
>
> They go out of their way to make the 'installation and learning curve as smooth as possible'..for beginners! And they are responsible for setting those kind of expectations up in peoples minds..at the 'beginning'! This is not the mindset you want when you enter the open source community...
>
> I guess this is ok, if you're only every going to encounter commercial solutions when you go out into the real world...but the world has changed a lot..and you're actually more likely to encounter non-commercial, open source software these days.
>
> So perhaps they should start teaching undergrad's how to setup an open-source operating system (preferably FreeBSD...Linux if you really have to..  ;-)
>
> They should teach undergrad's to program in C/C++ (since open-source o/s's are written in these languages - though more C than C++)
>
> They should teach undergrad's to program in a simple, plain text editor.
>
> They should teach undergrad's to compile/debug from the command line/shell.
>
> Instead, they teach C# on Windows, using VS.
>
> open source, and D too, did not come about as a result of C#/Windows/VS users being disappointed with their language and/or tooling ;-)
>
> So my recommendation for beginners, is [0..9]:
>
> [0] - dump windows! (or at least dual boot, or setup a vm or something).
> [1] - install FreeBSD (linux if you really have to ;-)
> [2] - start writing some C/C++ code using Vi, and compiling from the shell prompt.
> [3] - realise that there must be an easier way...
> [4] - install KDE (hey..we don't want things to be too hard..do we).
> [5] - dump C/C++ and install LLVM's D compiler => pkg install ldc
>       (or install DMD: just download from the website and extract it)
> [6] - open a 'more user friendly' text editor (like Kate).
> [7] - start coding again, in D this time.
> [8] - open a shell.
> [9] - start compiling/debugging.
>
> Then you *will* notice how much easier things are, and you won't be disappointed ;-)
>
> And...you'll be better prepared to join the D community (or any other open source community for that matter).

OK actually my initial proposal was this one :

http://forum.dlang.org/post/mailman.6425.1503876081.31550.digitalmars-d-bugs@puremagic.com

´´´
My proposal is change the Dlang.org main page so that it just :

1. Say "Welcome to D"

2. Show how D is nice, ending with a link to the feature page

3. Show how simple D code looks like, using 4 well chosen examples, with the first on the right of the main page.

4. Show how easy it is to learn D.

5. Show how easy it is to install DMD and a simple editor like CoEdit on any win/mac/linux computer.

So in practice, I'd advice the landing page to become something like that :

"Welcome to D

What is D?

D is the culmination of decades of experience implementing compilers for many diverse languages and has a unique set of features:

    high level constructs for great modeling power
    high performance, compiled language
    static typing
    direct interface to the operating system API's and hardware
    blazingly fast compile-times
    memory-safe subset (SafeD)
    maintainable, easy to understand code
    gradual learning curve (C-like syntax, similar to Java and others)
    compatible with C application binary interface
    limited compatibility with C++ application binary interface
    multi-paradigm (imperative, structured, object oriented, generic,
functional programming purity, and even assembly)
    built-in error detection (contracts, unittests)

... and many more {features}.

Take a tour

Want to try D online ? Simply click on the "run" button (or Ctrl-enter) below the example on the right to compile and run it. And the example can be freely edited if you want to experiment with D programming.

If you want to see other examples, click on the "next" button below to see the next example of the dlang-tour.

Further readings

* New to programming? Learn programming quickly and easily with the D language, using these freely downloadable books :

  * {http://ddili.org/ders/d.en/index.html}
  * {https://www.tutorialspoint.com/d_programming/}

* Already an experienced programmer? ...

  * etc etc ...

Installing D

...

* {https://dlang.org/download.html}

* {https://github.com/BBasile/Coedit}"

Moreover I advice there are at least the following code samples for the Dlang-Tour :

  1. How to declare, initialise and print simple variables (bool, int, float,
string, int[], int[string]).
  2. How to declare simple imperative functions (something like
v=GetFibonacci(n) and GetFibonacci(v,n) with a ref argument)
  3. How to declare classes with attributes and methods
  4. How to declare and use a function like a class method
  5. How to declare and use structs and pointers
  6. How to declare and use a template function
´´´

Now here I only suggest that D's website is more welcoming to Windows programmers and scripters by letting them easily and obvioulsy download the DMD compiler and the CoEdit editor directly from the top of the main page (separately, as two "setup.ex", or together in the same bundled "setup.exe"), so they don't have to figure out how to make D work by trials and errors.

That's a simple and easy way to make that D landing page more "beginner friendly" from a marketing point of view.

And the definitive answer about that is of course something like "Hey man, it's open source, it's all made by volunteers on their free time, so it must be complicated, what did you expect ?" and "Make all the changes by yourself if you don't like it the way it is.".

Seriously ?

OK, message received. If putting two download links per detected platform on the main page is too much work for the volunteers who maintains the landing page, so let's keep it the way it is. I have a lot of work and a family life too, no problem...
October 19, 2017
On Thursday, 19 October 2017 at 06:32:10 UTC, Ecstatic Coder wrote:
> [...]
>
> OK actually my initial proposal was this one :
>
> http://forum.dlang.org/post/mailman.6425.1503876081.31550.digitalmars-d-bugs@puremagic.com
>
> [...]
>
> And the definitive answer about that is of course something like "Hey man, it's open source, it's all made by volunteers on their free time, so it must be complicated, what did you expect ?" and "Make all the changes by yourself if you don't like it the way it is.".
>
> Seriously ?
>
> OK, message received. If putting two download links per detected platform on the main page is too much work for the volunteers who maintains the landing page, so let's keep it the way it is. I have a lot of work and a family life too, no problem...


I remember those events very differently, so here they are for posterity:

http://forum.dlang.org/thread/llreleiqxjllthmlgyhh@forum.dlang.org?page=1
http://forum.dlang.org/post/cxunwfnhdrlpujjxzraq@forum.dlang.org