Hi everybody,

As written in the description I'm really new to D, I discovered it a few weeks ago thanks to the D Conf in Berlin.

After playing around for couple of days with it, I wanted to share my journey with you guys on several points.



1 - Installation (DMD and DUB)

I'm running Fedora 23 on a daily basis and the installation was OK. Not as easy as on mac but still.
I can't say that that it was easy, because I had to curl dub.rpm package and compile it from source. But it doesn't matter because for a linux user thoses things a pretty usual.


2 - Play-around

That is the good part, after setting up my evt creating a Hello World project and something a bit more complicated was really easy.
Thank's to DUB which take care of everything for me I was able to create a website using Vibe.d project.
Congratulations on this point to all the people who made dub. Programming in 2016 should be like this.

The only bad point I can see here is that it looks like it's more easy easy to get ready on a mac than on a linux machine.
(I tried all this with a friend who is running the latest version of mac).



3 - Library

That part was also good. Clicking on the packages menu on the website and searching for the things I need was indeed super easy. Everything in a big registery that's cool.
I have a to say that I'm fucking amazed by the dlang.org website which is super fast (WOW).

4 - Documentation (For a newbie)

This part was a bit different. By being a total newbie to the D language I don't really know where to begins.
Of course I went to the getstarted.html page but as a newbie with no system programming background I feel there are too many choices for me.
IMHO the best solution here would some kind of step by step tutorial that go through all thoses points with very basic explanation.
After trying every of thoses pages, I finally try the "D Web Development Kai Nacke" book which is pretty interesting.

The only bad point here is that I can't find a "Effective D" page. A document that gives tips for writing clear, idiomatic D code. A must read for any new D programmer. It augments the tour and the language specification, both of which should be read first. (Like in golang for example)

5 - Tools

Well in one word. It sucks. I've tried to setup an editor with all the features that we can see in the wiki matrix.
The only one which take them all is vscode. But for setup the plugin I had to compile the workspace-d package (which at the end didn't worked https://github.com/Pure-D/workspace-d/issues/16#issuecomment-221274965).
So I folded over Sublime Text to have autocompletion but it's only available for the standard library (and not for Vibe.d, the things that i'm looking to use).

However I had to say that I was amazed by the rapidity of speed answer over my github issue, WebFreak001 is doing really great job here!!


So, my plan here is to get more knowledge about the dlang in near future. I'll be active on forum to annoy you guys.

Ps : I'm looking for up to date benchmark such as Dlang vs Go vs Nodejs vs Swift vs TurboPascal ;) (Actually without pascal).

Cheers

Dne 24.5.2016 v 17:27 llaine via Digitalmars-d-learn napsal(a):

> Hi everybody,
>
> As written in the description I'm really new to D, I discovered it a few weeks ago thanks to the D Conf in Berlin.
>
> After playing around for couple of days with it, I wanted to share my journey with you guys on several points.
>
> 1 - Installation (DMD and DUB)
>
> I'm running Fedora 23 on a daily basis and the installation was OK. Not as easy as on mac but still.
> I can't say that that it was easy, because I had to curl dub.rpm package and compile it from source. But it doesn't matter because for a linux user thoses things a pretty usual.
On Archlinux this is even easier than on Mac just sudo yaourt -Sy dlang dub

>
> 2 - Play-around
>
> That is the good part, after setting up my evt creating a Hello World project and something a bit more complicated was really easy.
> Thank's to DUB which take care of everything for me I was able to create a website using Vibe.d project.
> Congratulations on this point to all the people who made dub. Programming in 2016 should be like this.
>
> The only bad point I can see here is that it looks like it's more easy easy to get ready on a mac than on a linux machine.
> (I tried all this with a friend who is running the latest version of mac).
>
As I said earlier it is fedora who should be blamed here :D
> 3 - Library
>
> That part was also good. Clicking on the packages menu on the website and searching for the things I need was indeed super easy. Everything in a big registery that's cool.
> I have a to say that I'm fucking amazed by the dlang.org website which is super fast (WOW).
>
> 4 - Documentation (For a newbie)
>
> This part was a bit different. By being a total newbie to the D language I don't really know where to begins.
> Of course I went to the getstarted.html page but as a newbie with no system programming background I feel there are too many choices for me.
> IMHO the best solution here would some kind of step by step tutorial that go through all thoses points with very basic explanation.
> After trying every of thoses pages, I finally try the "D Web Development Kai Nacke" book which is pretty interesting.
>
> The only bad point here is that I can't find a "Effective D" page. A document that gives tips for writing clear, idiomatic D code. A must read for any new D programmer. It augments the tour and the language specification, both of which should be read first. (Like in golang for example)
>
> 5 - Tools
>
> Well in one word. It sucks. I've tried to setup an editor with all the features that we can see in the wiki matrix.
> The only one which take them all is vscode. But for setup the plugin I had to compile the workspace-d package (which at the end didn't worked https://github.com/Pure-D/workspace-d/issues/16#issuecomment-221274965).

Again on Archlinux just run this command: yaourt -Sy workspace-d and you are done :)

> So I folded over Sublime Text to have autocompletion but it's only available for the standard library (and not for Vibe.d, the things that i'm looking to use).
>
> However I had to say that I was amazed by the rapidity of speed answer over my github issue, WebFreak001 is doing really great job here!!
>
>
> So, my plan here is to get more knowledge about the dlang in near future. I'll be active on forum to annoy you guys.
>
> Ps : I'm looking for up to date benchmark such as Dlang vs Go vs Nodejs vs Swift vs TurboPascal ;) (Actually without pascal).
>
> Cheers
>
>

On Tuesday, 24 May 2016 at 15:27:45 UTC, llaine wrote:
> Hi everybody,
> [...]
>
> 5 - Tools

I've seen your comment on the DCD issue related to DUB (#198). It mays be the plugin (and not DCD ) that doesn't register well vibe-d. Also it's possible that it didn't work because vibe-d was not yet fetch.

On Tuesday, 24 May 2016 at 15:27:45 UTC, llaine wrote:
> I'm running Fedora 23 on a daily basis and the installation was OK. Not as easy as on mac but still.

Yeah, rpm based distributions like Fedora/Redhat/etc have historically been a real pain when it comes to installing stuff. Depending on individual files with no indication what package those files are in for instance.

I recommend something based on "pacman" these days, though you'll have to hunt a while if you want one that hasn't gone and added a bunch of binary linkage to systemd to their entire dependency tree.

portage is also alright, but a little tricky to use, and you need a speedy CPU to compile quickly.

> Congratulations on this point to all the people who made dub. Programming in 2016 should be like this.

It does have its issues, but dub is awesome.

> The only bad point I can see here is that it looks like it's more easy easy to get ready on a mac than on a linux machine.

A Fedora machine. Installing dub on Arch or Debian should work just fine.

> This part was a bit different. By being a total newbie to the D language I don't really know where to begins.
> Of course I went to the getstarted.html page but

> as a newbie with no system programming background I feel there are too many choices for me.

Oh, I don't think system programming is the issue here. It is kind of intimidating that the first place it points you for a basic total newbie tutorial is a big dead tree book that you can buy. It seems to me there could be something simpler than that for newbies, but a little more extensive than just the random code snippet it shows on the home page.

> The only bad point here is that I can't find a "Effective D" page. A document that gives tips for writing clear, idiomatic D code.

Wow, good luck there. I think D programmers are pretty unopinionated as to how you should write code. The language is complex enough that it keeps things in line pretty well on its own. And "idiom" is another word for "opinion" so ultimately how you should code depends more on who you're working with than the language itself.

I would appreciate a tips and tricks page though, with advice like separate large amounts of code into separate projects to get it to compile faster, or use ld.gold since D has ludicrous amounts of linkage going on, or my trick of throwing in --nodeps after the first compile that fixes dub's issues with eager dependency tracking. Or how you make parsing easier by importing inside functions instead of globally to the module. I wonder if there should be a wiki page like that, hm...

https://wiki.dlang.org/Tutorials by the way


> Well in one word. It sucks. I've tried to setup an editor with all the features that we can see in the wiki matrix.

Uh... huh. I just use emacs, because sometimes I'm coding on a netbook that isn't running X.

> autocompletion

Not as simple as it sounds. What should auto-complete? Module names? Misspellings? Potential imports? Download the list of package imports? File names? function names? Local variables? How's it going to detect the names of local variables? How's it going to detect which function the cursor is in? Autocomplete is something I don't really like, because it requires that your editor be some big dumb kitchen sink IDE in order to manage all that complex logic of guessing what you mean when you hit <TAB>.

There is one autocompletion bug that irritates the pants off of me, though. gdb. Why can't they fix their stupid debugger so that it let you auto-complete across the '.' character?

gdb's written in 69 megabytes of solid C though, not D.

On 05/24/2016 10:05 AM, cy wrote:
> On Tuesday, 24 May 2016 at 15:27:45 UTC, llaine wrote:

>> Of course I went to the getstarted.html page but
>
>> as a newbie with no system programming background I feel there are too
>> many choices for me.
>
> Oh, I don't think system programming is the issue here. It is kind of
> intimidating that the first place it points you for a basic total newbie
> tutorial is a big dead tree book that you can buy.

Yes, a link from that page points to a book that *can* be bought but it's available online as well:

  http://ddili.org/ders/d.en/index.html

Although it's not as extensive as it should be, I think the index page is pretty useful too:

  http://ddili.org/ders/d.en/ix.html

Ali

https://p0nce.github.io/d-idioms/ I wanted to mention as well, if you like idioms. That guy has some good ideas.

On Tuesday, 24 May 2016 at 17:36:45 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
> Yes, a link from that page points to a book that *can* be bought but it's available online as well:

It's worth buying, but the question is who's going to be comfortable with reading all that? It's very involved, not exactly a quickly crafted tutorial to "learn D in 5 minutes."

On Tuesday, 24 May 2016 at 18:03:17 UTC, cy wrote:
> https://p0nce.github.io/d-idioms/ I wanted to mention as well, if you like idioms. That guy has some good ideas.
>
> On Tuesday, 24 May 2016 at 17:36:45 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
>> Yes, a link from that page points to a book that *can* be bought but it's available online as well:
>
> It's worth buying, but the question is who's going to be comfortable with reading all that? It's very involved, not exactly a quickly crafted tutorial to "learn D in 5 minutes."

I guess it's worth pointing out that in the future (=next week) the menu link "Learn" and the according text section will point to the new tour (tour.dlang.org), which we are still working on & it's exactly crafted to be a "learn D in 5 minutes".
So any feedback about the tour is highly appreciated ;-)

On Tuesday, 24 May 2016 at 15:27:45 UTC, llaine wrote:
> As written in the description I'm really new to D, I discovered it a few weeks ago thanks to the D Conf in Berlin.
>
> After playing around for couple of days with it, I wanted to share my journey with you guys on several points.

Thanks for writing this!

The "First 5 Minutes" (or days) are an important aspect, which the D community tries to improve. Since active D users already forgot about their first contact with D, the only information on what to improve are newbies telling their experience.

On Tuesday, 24 May 2016 at 16:17:25 UTC, Daniel Kozak wrote:
> Dne 24.5.2016 v 17:27 llaine via Digitalmars-d-learn napsal(a):
>
>> [...]
> On Archlinux this is even easier than on Mac just sudo yaourt -Sy dlang dub
>
>>[...]
> As I said earlier it is fedora who should be blamed here :D
>> [...]
>
> Again on Archlinux just run this command: yaourt -Sy workspace-d and you are done :)
>
>> [...]

Thank your for your answer! Maybe all thoses are Fedora related yes :) But I guess that for the moment I have to keep it unfortunatly but that's OK, let's try to make dlang great on fedora !

On Tuesday, 24 May 2016 at 19:32:11 UTC, Seb wrote:
> On Tuesday, 24 May 2016 at 18:03:17 UTC, cy wrote:
>> https://p0nce.github.io/d-idioms/ I wanted to mention as well, if you like idioms. That guy has some good ideas.
>>
>> On Tuesday, 24 May 2016 at 17:36:45 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
>>> Yes, a link from that page points to a book that *can* be bought but it's available online as well:
>>
>> It's worth buying, but the question is who's going to be comfortable with reading all that? It's very involved, not exactly a quickly crafted tutorial to "learn D in 5 minutes."
>
> I guess it's worth pointing out that in the future (=next week) the menu link "Learn" and the according text section will point to the new tour (tour.dlang.org), which we are still working on & it's exactly crafted to be a "learn D in 5 minutes".
> So any feedback about the tour is highly appreciated ;-)

All right, let me take the tour properly and then give you a feedback on this one!!


Thank you all for your answer. I guess I'm going to keep strugling on it.

I was thinking that maybe I can (for help) try to build somekind of the dlang.tour.org but more "learn D in 5 minutes" oriented.
What do you guys think?