On Monday, 6 April 2015 at 23:51:17 UTC, Adam Hawkins wrote:
Hello everyone, this is my first post on the forum. I've been
investigating the language for the past few weeks. I was able
to complete my first useful program thanks to very helpful
people in #d on IRC . The experience made me very interested in
the language and improving the community around it.
I'm primarily Ruby developer (been so about the last 7-8 years)
doing web stuff with significant JavaScript work as well. I
wrote a blog post on why I'm excited about D. You can read it
here: http://hawkins.io/2015/04/excited-about-d/.
I've been reading the forums here so I can see that there is a
focus on improving the marketing for the language and growing
the community. I see most of the effort is geared towards C++
programmers, but have you considered looking at us dynamic
languages folk? I see a big upside for us. Moving from Ruby to
D (my case) gives me power & performance. I still have OOP
techniques but I still have functional things like closures and
all that good stuff. Only trade off in the Ruby case is
metaprogramming. All in all I think there is a significant
value promise for those of us doing backend services for folks
like me.
Regardless, I figured it might be interesting to hear about
some experience coming to the language from a different
perspective. Cheers!
The thing I liked, coming from languages like R and Ruby, was
that I could write D code in the most convenient, least efficient
manner possible and still get good enough performance that it
wouldn't matter. I find D to be easier to write than any
scripting language. When I write D I always have to remind myself
that I can just write, without concern for efficiency. And in the
few cases that performance is critical I know I can do as well as
C.
