On 06/03/2010 07:58 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
D is an extremely powerful language, but when I read complaints and
sighs about other languages, few seem to know that these problems are
solved with D. Essentially, we have a marketing problem.
One great way to address it is by writing articles about various aspects
of D and how they solve problems, like
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cb14j/compiletime_function_execution_in_d/
which was well received on reddit.
Anyone have good ideas on topics for D articles? And anyone want to
stand up and write an article?
They don't have to be comprehensive articles (though of course those are
better), even blog entries will do.
One thing that I think will really make people really notice D is
std.concurrency. If it makes concurrency as easy as that in Erlang,
that will be a huge win and definitely make it stand out vs. many other
languages.
Here are some other thoughts:
- Compare D to scripting languages like Perl and Python to show how you
can do similar things. I suggest this because to me, it seems like D
compares very nicely to Perl 5 in terms of getting things done. Also,
if you show that the code is about as easy to write, fast to compile,
and can do the job in less time, win!
- Re-write some basic Unix utilities in D and compare the code. grep
would probably be a good one to start with since it can leverage D's
built in regular expressions.
- Show how much better D is at handling errors/exceptions with some
real-world examples. A big win would be to show that D can resist some
common attacks, such as buffer overflows. That would be interesting to
people who have to write secure network applications.
Casey
