I wasn't going to reply, until you tweeted.
No just no.
When dealing with tertiary institutions especially New Zealand ones,
you've got to understand they have massive pressure to get through
content. Every single class is standardized nationally, by law.
You're all worried about doing things best practice in an eco-system.
That is just not the case here. In these courses they are not meant to
be teaching a language. But instead use said language to teach with.
The most time a student gets in ANY language is 2 semesters. By the time
they reach third year (last) they only have 1 per language.
In these classes the concern is teaching some other relevant concept
such as design patterns.
So you're pushing limited class time for the purpose of teaching actual
class content instead of non required information for assignments.
Its a balancing act.
But you've got to understand that most of the students going through it,
are just not interested in going much further then the assignments.
Simple things like trying OpenGL are beyond them and this is ok. They
have a lot of things to learn and have real life requirements outside of
study.
The average person learning to program is not spending half the time
most D developers do on a slow week. Again this is ok. But we need to
acknowledge that they won't be anywhere near us or our expectations
normally.
To assume the average person will play around and learn pip ext. is just
ridiculous. Especially when they have most if not all the code they need
already available to them via the distribution.
These are the same people who we may barely convince to try D out. If
they struggle to do basic things or at least perceived basic things then
they won't bother and just say 'too hard'.
If we can make them happy, most developers over all will be happy. Even
the average D developer will be glad for it.
At the end of the day, the least amount of steps to do what is perceived
as basic tasks without any conflicting arguments the better.
I keep saying about perceived basic tasks. Psychology. A fourteen year
old today was born in 2002. I learned to program when I was 14. In 2001
XP was just released. The people learning programming now expect GUI's
and perceive it as basic. We may know better but at the end of the day,
how can we appeal to them realistically?
