Dear Dees,

Here is the article. I've set up a (temporary?) blog for it. The article deals with the "usability" of D and how it helped to solve certain problems. It's not about benchmarking, concurrency, unit tests and the like. Just about how "practical" it is.

Here it is, warts and all: http://wendlerchristoph.wordpress.com/2013/07/30/probably-d/

Comments are welcome. If you think it's interesting enough, we can post it to gamedev. Although I think it is not very "techy".

Chris:

> http://wendlerchristoph.wordpress.com/2013/07/30/probably-d/

>[Python] copyright issues (easily decompilable byte code)<

Is that true?


For small D examples I suggest the Rosettacode site (when its site isn't down).

Bye,
bearophile

It's a good "why should I care about D" article. I frequent Hacker News, and one thing that seems to get people really hyped about a language is "Getting Things Done", as well as all the functional programming hype.

One thing that caught my eye:

"I also recommend the book The D Programming Language by Alexei Alexandrescu. The author not only describes the language but also explains the reasoning behind the language design. Apart from learning about D, you learn a lot about programming in general, and believe it or not, it’s also fun to read."

I have to agree, Andrei has a great writing style. I've read TDPL through 3 times now, and I can't say that there's any section that I find dry or boring.

On Tuesday, 30 July 2013 at 13:53:24 UTC, Chris wrote:
> Dear Dees,
>
> Here is the article. I've set up a (temporary?) blog for it. The article deals with the "usability" of D and how it helped to solve certain problems. It's not about benchmarking, concurrency, unit tests and the like. Just about how "practical" it is.
>
> Here it is, warts and all: http://wendlerchristoph.wordpress.com/2013/07/30/probably-d/
>
> Comments are welcome. If you think it's interesting enough, we can post it to gamedev. Although I think it is not very "techy".

Good one, worth sharing. As a D user I'd probably love to see more technical details but for a wider public it is a solid match. Though you will almost certainly be asked about how you have handled phone platform in the end, may be worth mentioning it explicitly. As D is not there yet guess web fallback is used?

On 7/30/13 8:47 AM, Meta wrote:
> It's a good "why should I care about D" article. I frequent Hacker News,
> and one thing that seems to get people really hyped about a language is
> "Getting Things Done", as well as all the functional programming hype.
>
> One thing that caught my eye:
>
> "I also recommend the book The D Programming Language by Alexei
> Alexandrescu. The author not only describes the language but also
> explains the reasoning behind the language design. Apart from learning
> about D, you learn a lot about programming in general, and believe it or
> not, it’s also fun to read."

They should've called me Alexei Andreescu!

Andrei

On Tuesday, 30 July 2013 at 19:04:12 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 7/30/13 8:47 AM, Meta wrote:
>> It's a good "why should I care about D" article. I frequent Hacker News,
>> and one thing that seems to get people really hyped about a language is
>> "Getting Things Done", as well as all the functional programming hype.
>>
>> One thing that caught my eye:
>>
>> "I also recommend the book The D Programming Language by Alexei
>> Alexandrescu. The author not only describes the language but also
>> explains the reasoning behind the language design. Apart from learning
>> about D, you learn a lot about programming in general, and believe it or
>> not, it’s also fun to read."
>
> They should've called me Alexei Andreescu!
>
> Andrei

Ha ha ha! I've altered your ego.

On Tuesday, 30 July 2013 at 14:21:06 UTC, bearophile wrote:
> Chris:
>
>> http://wendlerchristoph.wordpress.com/2013/07/30/probably-d/
>
>>[Python] copyright issues (easily decompilable byte code)<
>
> Is that true?
>
>
> For small D examples I suggest the Rosettacode site (when its site isn't down).
>
> Bye,
> bearophile

It was an issue with the legal department. A compiled D binary might be a harder nut to crack, especially for the "casual cracker" who wants to give it a go when s/he sees a .pyc file. Same goes for Java. But if you know something that might interest me, please tell me.

On Tuesday, 30 July 2013 at 15:47:29 UTC, Meta wrote:
> It's a good "why should I care about D" article. I frequent Hacker News, and one thing that seems to get people really hyped about a language is "Getting Things Done", as well as all the functional programming hype.
>

That was the reason why I wrote this short article. To share my own experience and to show people that it is a "real world" language that helps to solve real problems. Benchmarking and feature comparison alone will never convince people, because the first question is usually along the lines of "What can the language do for me? Is it easy? I don't want to spend much time learning a new language!" Then they ask if there are any useful libraries (C interfacing) and if it's portable. Nobody wants to write the code more than once. Part of Java's and later Android's success was exactly this.

On Tuesday, 30 July 2013 at 17:23:34 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
> Good one, worth sharing. As a D user I'd probably love to see more technical details but for a wider public it is a solid match.

The technical details are rather boring. Good old OOP and I made use of D's structs and some other nice features. Nothing a D user, in fact any programmer, would not be familiar with.

> Though you will almost certainly be asked about how you have handled phone platform in the end, may be worth mentioning it explicitly. As D is not there yet guess web fallback is used?

This is a good point! I haven't tackled mobile phones yet, and I doubt that it will be easy. I didn't include it in the article because I have no experience with D on mobile yet. However, I hope that D will get there. In the meantime, there is the web, as you said.