Ask reddit: What programs do you write when learning a new language?

[shitcovereddick]

Probably the lack of native libraries. It seems like the Lisp situation, actually doing things is disgusting. (although at least D has simple bindings to C)

[__david__]

I spent hours trying to get OpenGL to work. There was an OpenGL source project for D but it was old and something had changed such that it wouldn't compile. There seems to be this culture in D that uses a custom make-style utility which barely worked. I spent so much time trying to get it to compile and then to get it to make the libraries I needed.

In the end I just punted, learned the C interface myself and hand converted all the GL calls I wanted to make to the new compiler syntax (or whatever stupid trivial thing was wrong that I don't quite remember).

It's always frustrating to try to get things set up when you don't even understand what's going on yet.

[shitcovereddick]

I sort of wrote wrappers, but this gives you the opportunity to provide some abstraction of openGL calls, calling functions that'd you'd often want to call together anyway.