Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
Teaching Software Engineering in DLang [pdf] (dconf.org)
82 points by teleforce on Sept 23, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 8 comments


D is a interesting language, its in the middle between a low-level language and a high-level language. You can quickly script with it but you can also produce complex and fast applications.

Its in a weird spot but its faschinating worth exploring it.

It's a flexible language, if you're coming from C / C++, you might like the -BetterC flag.


Does D still have any potential, considering that Rust, Zig, and Vale have occupied a lot of the mindspace for modern systems programming languages?


Is D better than C++ for many things, including teaching? Definitely. It is a nice language that produces fast programs and is nice to read. It's also very good as a scripting language that can be compiled on demand with rdmd.

But I have to admit that I have been spoiled by Rust. D still blows Rust out of the water when you just want to write a "script" do to some small standalone task very efficiently (with rdmd), but for writing more complex programs Rust's type system feels much nicer.


Thought that said "Da Nang" at first, and thought it was making an Apocalypse Now reference regarding Software Engineering.

Like

"When I'm coding, I want to stop, when I stop, all I can think about is coding".

"When I went home, I just stared at the wall thinking of code, I didn't say anything until I said yes to a divorce".


This made me LOL... you've brightened my day.


[flagged]


On the surface I'd agree, but the devil is in the details. The presenter is a professor and he probably designed the slides taking in account a student audience instead of the "usual" industry audience. Why that matters is because students might read the slides on their own without "attending" the presentation, and so he needed to cram as much context as possible on each slide.

Basically (from my viewpoint) these slides are supposed to stand on their own as a lesson instead of an auxiliary aid or tool as in a "show" put on a stage by an industry expert. Neither case is lesser than the other, but the goals lead to different design that might be interpreted as wrong (from the other side).

Of course this all rests on my assumptions, if the presenter didn't intend these slides to work on their own then indeed they're not good.


I like to use the "Notes" section for that.

My slideshows tend to be very obtuse, on their own, but they make a lot of sense, if you read the notes (which are often a script or prompts for speaking).

Here's an example (Apple Keynote): https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY/ITCB-master/blob/master/P...

The presentation doesn't have that many slides, has a lot of images and animations, and assumes that I'll be chatting away.


I agree. The slides must be nice for the talk. For a self reading material make an extended version or the notes or a blog post expanding the slides.

I've seen a lot of academic presentations that are a big wall of text or a big wall of formulas[1], and they are never good. Fontsize >= 28 (or 24), one (or two) big graphics per slide, number of slides <= minutes/2 (or 3).

[1] The problem with LaTeX is that it's very easy to add some $formulas$ an it's very painful to add graphics, so in math some people just write formulas and more formulas.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: