I'm a newbie to programming and have been looking into the D lang as a general purposing language to learn, yet the D overview indicates that java would be a better language to learn for your first programming language. Why?  Looks like D is easier than Java...

On 10/16/2014 03:26 PM, RBfromME wrote:

> I'm a newbie to programming and have been looking into the D lang as a
> general purposing language to learn, yet the D overview indicates that
> java would be a better language to learn for your first programming
> language. Why?  Looks like D is easier than Java...

Here:

  http://dlang.org/overview.html

"As a first programming language - Basic or Java is more suitable for beginners."

I say, just ignore that comment. :) We should open a bug report for that page.

I had great fun writing a programming book for complete beginners and found it very easy to use D for that purpose:

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

Ali

On Thursday, 16 October 2014 at 22:26:51 UTC, RBfromME wrote:
> I'm a newbie to programming and have been looking into the D lang as a general purposing language to learn, yet the D overview indicates that java would be a better language to learn for your first programming language. Why?  Looks like D is easier than Java...

The Overview page is ancient and needs to be rewritten. The included example sieve program reflects this. It's almost C (you'd only need to make minor changes to 4 of the lines to make it build with gcc). I'd agree that C probably isn't a good first language. The overview also suggests learning BASIC first which also shows just how old the Overview is (where do you even get a BASIC compiler these days?).

There are easier languages but modern, idiomatic D is perfectly approachable for beginners in my opinion.

https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13624

On Thu, 16 Oct 2014 22:43:11 +0000
Brad Anderson via Digitalmars-d-learn
<digitalmars-d-learn@puremagic.com> wrote:

> also shows just how old the Overview is (where do you even get a BASIC compiler these days?).
voila: http://www.freebasic.net/
;-)

On Thursday, 16 October 2014 at 22:42:21 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
> On 10/16/2014 03:26 PM, RBfromME wrote:
>
> > I'm a newbie to programming and have been looking into the D
> lang as a
> > general purposing language to learn, yet the D overview
> indicates that
> > java would be a better language to learn for your first
> programming
> > language. Why?  Looks like D is easier than Java...
>
> Here:
>
>   http://dlang.org/overview.html
>
> "As a first programming language - Basic or Java is more suitable for beginners."
>
> I say, just ignore that comment. :) We should open a bug report for that page.
>
> I had great fun writing a programming book for complete beginners and found it very easy to use D for that purpose:
>
>   http://ddili.org/ders/d.en/
>
> Ali

I don't understand. If at least it were C but java? why not D itself?

On Fri, 17 Oct 2014 00:52:14 +0000
MachineCode via Digitalmars-d-learn <digitalmars-d-learn@puremagic.com>
wrote:

> I don't understand. If at least it were C but java? why not D itself?
C is *awful* as "beginner's language". never ever let people start with C if you don't hate 'em.

as for D... current version of D can be used, but with some precautions. we now have excellent book by Ali. (it's great, really! i believe that it must be featured on the front dlang.org page!) but java has alot more books and tutorials.

not that D is bad for beginners, it's just has a smaller userbase. and all that things with "classes are reference types and structs are not", "empty array is not empty array but is empty array" and so on D may be confusing a little. it's good to have some CS background to understood that things.

just my cent and cent.

RBfromME:

> I'm a newbie to programming and have been looking into the D lang as a general purposing language to learn, yet the D overview indicates that java would be a better language to learn for your first programming language. Why?  Looks like D is easier than Java...

Python is probably a better first language than Java. D is a
little too much complex as first language.

Bye,
bearophile

On Friday, 17 October 2014 at 01:14:34 UTC, bearophile wrote:
> Python is probably a better first language than Java. D is a
> little too much complex as first language.

The IDE support is probably a bit better with Java/C# and using a statically typed language as your first language has advantages, but all are good first languages: easy to find tutorials, easy to find educational example code, easy to find answers to typical beginner issues on Stackoverflow…

I personally think Logo, Processing and Scheme would be more fun as learning tools, but they are throw-away languages. E.g. http://turtleacademy.com/programs/en http://www.processing.org/ and many more online programming sites.

While d can be complex, there's nothing preventing you from starting out
simple and not using all features at first.
I don't understand why it's not suitable for a beginner if you use this
approach...

2014-10-17 6:51 GMT+02:00 via Digitalmars-d-learn < digitalmars-d-learn@puremagic.com>:

> On Friday, 17 October 2014 at 01:14:34 UTC, bearophile wrote:
>
>> Python is probably a better first language than Java. D is a little too much complex as first language.
>>
>
> The IDE support is probably a bit better with Java/C# and using a statically typed language as your first language has advantages, but all are good first languages: easy to find tutorials, easy to find educational example code, easy to find answers to typical beginner issues on Stackoverflow…
>
> I personally think Logo, Processing and Scheme would be more fun as learning tools, but they are throw-away languages. E.g. http://turtleacademy.com/programs/en http://www.processing.org/ and many more online programming sites.
>
>
>

On 17/10/14 07:38, maarten van damme via Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
> While d can be complex, there's nothing preventing you from starting out
> simple and not using all features at first.
> I don't understand why it's not suitable for a beginner if you use this
> approach...

For some reasons, in my view: A beginner has to learn programming in addition to a first lang. A beginner has to learn a first lang in addition to programming. We learn languages by understanding valid, meaningful input, ie here reading code. All static langs introduce tons of complication only due to their "staticity". D is rather big & complex, in the field of static langs. Most code will use more than a theoretical minimal set of features. And this minimal set is far more in size, difficulty, complication than in langs partly designed  for ease of learning (Lua, Python, Scheme...). Even plain C is far more difficult than say, Lua.

d