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...
I have taught programming and programming language for several years, last 4 in University. In Belarus we have traditionally program that starts with C as subset of C++ (or even pure C), than C++ and only after that Java or C#. There are many high-qualified programmers, who absolve such program. Thus we have a proof, that even C can be first language. But in my opinion C is not the simplest way in programming for beginners. D is perfectly suite education purpose (in place of C and C++ of our belarusian program), because it has C-like syntax (Pascal hasn't), it is multi-paradigmal and has procedural-structural paradigm as C and C++ (but not Java or C#) and this paradigm is start point of programing for years, D also has more convenient and clearer syntax than C and C++. The main objection vs. dlang is that D is unpopular and probably you can't find job offer in this language. But this objection is weak, if D is your first language, because IT-student learn much more than one language during education, and D is very good start and view point for such languages as C/C++, Java and C#, the most popular professional languages. And many habits that will be learned in D (such is unittesting, contract programing and many others) will serve well in future for language without intrinsic support of these features.
RBfromME, I have interest to teach D as first language and also to teach foreigner. So if you want, I can tutor you through e-mail and github totally free.
harald_zea...@tut.by
