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?
I will be presenting D to such an audience at METU in Ankara.
What are the points that you would stress? I am thinking that
they would be interested more in whether D is better as a
teaching tool. Do you agree?
Ali
As an academic, the things I would hope you would cover are:
Simplicity: That is, its real easy to say something in D, and
certainly easier than in Java. The message here is stop teaching
Java and start teaching D to first year students.
Cleanness of expression: That is, it is so much easier to express
yourself in D than in C++ (for example, template
meta-programming). That is, use D as an intermediate language
for second year students learning about algorithms.
Multi-paradigm: That is, since you already know OOP and D, you
can learn other paradigms with a language you already know
(functional, parallel, embedded, etc). That is, use D for third
year programming language courses too.
If you with to appeal to the brightest students then you need to
cover topics of interest to them. That would include interfaces
to tools they understand (Hadoop, etc), efficiency (i.e. the
@nogc), distributed programming, and so on.
