this bit from the article surprised me

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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.

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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.