On 07/03/16 12:26 PM, Jesse Phillips wrote:
On Sunday, 6 March 2016 at 17:53:23 UTC, Seb wrote:
On Sunday, 6 March 2016 at 07:38:01 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
Motivated by Dmitry's "Pitching D to a gang of Gophers" thread, how
about pitching it to a gang of professors and graduate students?
If you want D to flourish, you should _really_ focus on this.
Many CS students usually learn only one or two language at university.
I think this can be one of the selling points. In general, languages
aren't the teaching goal of a university.
Python/Java - These get chosen for early courses. Python likely because
of its strict formatting (get people used to formatting code), the
language is high level and has rich collection of libraries. Both of the
languages prevent worrying about a lot of other details (memory,
procedural is easy to explain)
C/C++ - These come into later classes, I'd guess because they are used
in industry and have unique usage requirements (null pointers, double free)
Otherwise courses seem to expect you know one language (java/python) and
try to teach you concepts within that language, and sometimes allow you
to do the homework in any language.
I think D is the right choice because it can demonstrate concepts while
provide the advantages of why other languages are chosen. And it has a
very nice set of toys that many students will enjoy playing with and
using in their homework. It makes a good learning language because it
makes a good using language.
This is actually the primary argument I made for my tertiary institute
in making D the first language. It ended up with pretty much every tutor
and even head of department (who was a programmer) agreeing with me.
Of course that's a big change and industry doesn't reflect it. So don't
expect it to happen.
