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this bit from the article surprised me 8<------------- I spend an inordinate amount of time helping the kids set up their build environments, and having this

by zem 3y ago

this bit from the article surprised me 8<------------- I spend an inordinate amount of time helping the kids set up their build environments, and having this built-in to the IDE or dub would be immensely helpful for using D for learning. 8<------------- it does seem to have worked out in the end, but I would personally not have considered anything where building was not one click of a button in an ide; build toolchains add a tremendous amount of complexity to learning a new language, and especially if this is also an intro to programming I would consider it a fatal lack.

jpgvm 3y ago
I ended up teaching a friend to program using Kotlin. The downside was just telling them to just accept what the IDE wizard lays down as gospel first but the advantage was that running code from main() or tests was always a fully IDE integrated experience. Explaining the build system boilerplate became natural when it came time to start adding dependencies to the project. Don't underestimate how important that integrated experience is. Within their first month or so they were already using a real graphical debugger which is something I didn't pick up until much later because of where I started.
- p0nce 3y ago
  As a D cultist, I don't see why D would be any more viable rather than PureBASIC, microStudio, or Basic4GL if we're talking about kids that want an immediate result in an integrated IDE.