> I wish I had this when I begun. My first usage of D implyed a compilation of > ldc, then gdc (the only one that worked at the time on my plateform) and > patching phobos by myself (reminder, it was the first time I used that > language, not to mention it was pretty harsh and I think most people would > have quit at this point). It was few years ago, and thing got better since. > > But I'm convienced that D isn't accesible enough for beginers. So this > document is very welcome !
I agree, D is not that accessible to beginners, partially due to the rapidly changing nature of the language and technology. I found it difficult to start when every library I encountered was broken, either because it hadn't been ported to D2, or used libraries that were broken for some reason. Hopefully once the language and compiler specs settle down a lot more, we can start work on making things easier overall. I for one would love to see a clang-style autocompleter for D, compiler packages for the major OSes/distributions that work with 99% of the D code out there, some sort of simple project-finder so we can find libraries easily, etc, etc. Also, more documentation, not the kind of documentation we have now, which is really good, but requires a certain amount of knowledge to start with, but closer to "Learn how to program, with D". Personally I think D would be a brilliant language to teach with, it has decent OO, is compile-time checked, has pointers, but you often don't need them, templates that can be used like Java/C# generics but also allow for more complex constructs. You can start out with "this is a variable" go through "these are pointers" and end with "this is meta-programming".
