The article only mentions a few of D's features. There are a lot more improvements. The templating system for instance is quite innovative. http://www.digitalmars.com/d/templates-revisited.html Variadic Templestes: http://www.digitalmars.com/d/variadic-function-templates.htm...

But there are other things as well like the lazy evaluation, and built in contract and unit test support.

Ave a look at the articles on this page http://www.digitalmars.com/d/

And the specifications http://www.digitalmars.com/d/lex.html

Templates in D look like just a syntactically polished variation of C++ templates. Of course there are some new features there, but I don't see anything that can't be done with a compiler that is capable of evaluating some functions at compile-time. C++ can't do that, but my point is, why bother creating such a complicated template system for something that can be done the easy way?

Variadic templates: can be done with variant arrays and again, with smart compile-time evaluation if necessary.