digitalmars.D - Journey to D and Thank you
- GregR (39/39) Sep 29 After quite some time developing applications in C and C++, I
- mw (3/8) Sep 29 Well said!
- Bastiaan Veelo (4/6) Sep 30 A nice read, and welcome!
- Imperatorn (2/5) Sep 30 If you focus on the good parts, D is a very competent language.
- Mike Shah (7/10) Sep 30 Welcome Greg! Thanks for the kind words! :)
- Dejan Lekic (5/8) Oct 01 Welcome GregR!
After quite some time developing applications in C and C++, I started a journey exploring new languages over the last 8 years. Go was simple and easy to ramp up, channels were awesome, yet it got repetitive and tiring. Rust had great tooling (relative to C++), nice functional elements, and ownership was interesting. Yet the complexity, verbosity, and restrictions took me back to C++. Then came Clojure and Elixir and I thought I found my home. Yet as I built larger projects, I found I disliked dynamic typing, especially during refactoring. So after a short stop with Scala, it was on to Haskell. Haskell was a fun puzzle but I found myself often wanting to just write some damn imperative code or mess with memory via a pointer. So it was back to C++, full of its warts, with a new appreciation for its expressiveness. Yet I really missed some of the functional approaches I had come to enjoy from earlier languages. While it certainly can be done, I found it cumbersome. Then one evening I was doing my normal run through YouTube channels on programming and came across a presentation from Mike Shah on D. I kept on scrolling thinking back to what I heard before about "D being a failed attempt to improve on C++". I then stopped and realized I knew nothing about why this may or may not be true, and decided to give it a watch. I was immediately captivated. D had the parts of C++ that I loved with burrs removed and simple yet powerful features added. The module system, tooling, function call syntax, a full-featured standard library, arrays, ranges, and flexible memory management looked awesome. 8 months in and I am still loving the langauge. I am quite frankly shocked D is not more well known. The power and expressiveness of the language makes programming fun again. Yet today I am very disappointed. I just finished building a chess game w/ a simple engine in D, and I can only very rarely beat it..guess my chess game is not what it used to be... Anyhow a big thank you to Mike Shah for getting content out on YouTube that helped me discover D. And a big thank you to the community that is driving the development of D. While there is no one perfect language, I find that for what I like to do, programming in D is a great fit and most importantly, enjoyable.
Sep 29
mw <mw gmail.com> On Sunday, 29 September 2024 at 15:54:13 UTC, GregR wrote:Anyhow a big thank you to Mike Shah for getting content out on YouTube that helped me discover D. And a big thank you to the community that is driving the development of D. While there is no one perfect language, I find that for what I like to do, programming in D is a great fit and most importantly, enjoyable.Well said! Welcome to D.
Sep 29
On Sunday, 29 September 2024 at 15:54:13 UTC, GregR wrote: [...]I find that for what I like to do, programming in D is a great fit and most importantly, enjoyable.A nice read, and welcome! -- Bastiaan.
Sep 30
On Sunday, 29 September 2024 at 15:54:13 UTC, GregR wrote:After quite some time developing applications in C and C++, I started a journey exploring new languages over the last 8 years. [...]If you focus on the good parts, D is a very competent language.
Sep 30
On Sunday, 29 September 2024 at 15:54:13 UTC, GregR wrote:After quite some time developing applications in C and C++, I started a journey exploring new languages over the last 8 years. [...]Welcome Greg! Thanks for the kind words! :) I always have to pay it forward to Ali Cehreli who brought me in with his fantastic and free book. Many other wonderful folks who contribute to D past and present as well :) D really is enjoyable to program in -- I just think it's a great language for getting engineering done.
Sep 30
On Sunday, 29 September 2024 at 15:54:13 UTC, GregR wrote:Yet today I am very disappointed. I just finished building a chess game w/ a simple engine in D, and I can only very rarely beat it..guess my chess game is not what it used to be...Welcome GregR! Try to beat Amoeba (chess engine written in D): https://github.com/abulmo/amoeba (ELO 3145 on CCRL - https://computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/4040/)
Oct 01