Unfortunately, I don't know that I'm going to spend a lot of time on it right now. In many ways it's like Racket or Scheme. It's a solid language but it's just not at a point where it's reasonable to try to use it for work.
It needs a better website and better access to the outside world, i.e., more libraries. It's "sort of" compatible with C - dealing with C header files is a lot of work. If I want to install an extension in R or Python or some other language (in R they're called packages), they're easy to find and easy to install and get working properly. That's not really the case with D. Heck, it's hard to even tell if individual projects (most of which are partially done at best) are still active.
Hopefully these things will get worked out. I doubt that they will, unless a large corporation decides it has a reason to invest in D development, but I'll give it another try in a year and see if I feel more comfortable with it.
Yes, D is a better C++, but I'm not sure I'm looking for C++. For now I'm more than happy to push forward with my combination of Clojure, R, Fortran, and newLISP. Lisp is just more compatible with my brain.
Languages to learn over the next couple of years: Scala, OCaml, and Haskell. Other possibilities: Go, Factor, Forth, Pure. Even if I don't use a language for real tasks, it's never a bad thing to pick up some new approaches to old problems.
I think Go really took the wind out of D's sails. I'm not sure what D offers over Go right now.
ReplyDeleteYour comment reminds me that Go is on my list of possibilities the next couple of years.
ReplyDeleteThe two reasons I haven't done anything yet with Go is that the benchmarks I've seen indicate it's pretty slow relative to both C++ and D, and the lack of a good introductory book.
I may be wrong on both counts, as I haven't had time to dig into it deeply.
Go definitely looks interesting and recently I think there have been quite some improvements on speed but I haven't looked closely at it so far (focusing on Scala and a little Haskell right now).
ReplyDeleteThere are 2 German books on Go and an English one coming up in Q1 2012. It will be written by Mark Summerfield who wrote a pretty good book on Python 3, so his Go book might be good. It will be called "Programming in Go
Creating Applications for the 21st Century"
The subtitle is a little too much marketing but if this is as good as the Python 3 book, I will get a copy.
Thanks for the info. If a good book comes along, I'll definitely get a copy and try it out.
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