is D worth learning?

The D programming language... is it worth taking my time off my current projects to learn?

I've actually found one independenet game programmer who uses D -- source code included with this halfpipe shooter called Torus Trooper is written entirely in D.

But will this language ever really take off enough to warrant learning it?  There aren't even any books on it, and that may be a bit of a handicap in really getting mentally "into" it.

I think D's a wonderful replacement for C, and a good replacement for C++. It holds huge promise in the system-programming space. I can definitely see it replacing C and C++ for new code in that domain within a decade of it going 1.0.

The whole "profit" angle is misinformed (hi, >>2, stop using double negation everywhere, I have no idea what you're trying to say), because the front-end is free as in speech, and there's a GCC version: http://dgcc.sourceforge.net/ Also, it is getting more popular: http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm

However, D is definitely for experienced programmers. If you haven't spent a few years mucking around with C and C++, you're not going to get it easily. The language is still in flux, you'll often find yourself rolling your own bindings to C libs (since nobody else has), and documentation is thin outside of some tutorials and newsgroups.

If you're planning on learning either Python or D, learn Python. Python will let you get things done, today, and maybe even a job (like me, yay). If you're into CG, Python is increasingly common (not just with Blender) in the 3D arena.

BTW, while Python is damn useful, it is not clean, unless you're comparing it to something like Perl or PHP.