D has been a part of my programming life almost from the beginning. I started with ZZT an ascii computer game, HTML played a role in my development but ultimately chose perl as my first programming language while a friend picked up BASIC. I read through most of "Teach Yourself C++ in 21 Days." All of this was in High School. I finally took a course in Java and on of the things I did was look for a better language than C++, I came across D and I'm talking old docs. But I wasn't ready for a language this young. Finally a few years later I went to look for that better language again (couldn't remember the name for the life of me) and it has been with me ever since.
D has become my scripting language. When others would reach for a dynamic language, I grab D. It is also a language I get to use to explore other areas of programming: different programming techniques, different programming layers (compile time vs runtime), manual memory management, C, DLLs, COM, Webservers, GUI.
See, the graphical side of D still hasn't reached a reasonable state even today. But there are bindings and it can be done. Outside of that though, D has created a rich capability as a Swiss army knife. I have to test our software, which means doing some very innovative stuff like writing a MSI Custom Action DLL. On top of that I need to inject it into the MSI and Orca wouldn't do when the setup would be automated and that meant oven more Win32 API calls for MSI manipulation. While I know I could write the DLL in C# I'm not sure if manipulating the MSI could have been done outside C, C++, D.
Top comments (1)
Apparently you could do it in C# (thanks for making me google this -- it's an interesting question!). Not that I'm advocating against D (or any other language). I celebrate language diversity and getting stuff done in different languages (: