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Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

nim-lang.org

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Re: Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

#41

Post by ebbv »

dom96 wrote: post #40
ebbv wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brief is not the same as lazy. I personally find comments that say what they mean to say in a short amount of text much more useful than ones that go on for paragraphs without saying anything new. I strive for brevity. I revised the one you responded to so you may want to check that now. As far as more details of what I don't like about Nim, that would have been easy to ask directly; I find the syntax of: echo("Hello…

> As far as more details of what I don't like about Nim, that would have been easy to ask directly; I find the syntax of: > echo("Hello world!") Would you prefer System.out.println("Hello world!"); instead? > I far prefer the set of cases to be indented from the case statement itself. You can in fact do that, it is however optional. > And the "in" on each line is redundant cruft. Not sure what you mean here. "in" is…

> Would you prefer System.out.println("Hello world!"); instead?

This is why I didn't get into details originally because I knew I would get this kind of response.

You know full well that's exactly the opposite of what I mean. You're being an asshole for no reason.

> Not sure what you mean here. "in" is only used in for loops.

I meant the "of"s, of course.

Re: Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

#42

Post by klibertp »

simias wrote: post #28
themartorana wrote: post #9

All the hype on HN seems to be towards Rust and Go (with Go having its share of haters), but Nim sounds particularly interesting as a side-step from Python that runs faster than both Go and Rust. Can anyone give me some insight as to why it's not as hyped, if at all? I'm rather unfamiliar with Nim, and it's seems to have a smaller community, but it feels like it should be getting all sorts of love considering its spe…

For me the feature that makes Rust stand out is memory safety without garbage collection. It's got all the goodness you'd expect from a modern programming language while giving me basically all the flexibility I could get from writing C or C++. That's a very strong differencing trait, at least for me. I've never used Nim and I should probably give it a try but it seems that the "garbage collected, parallel oriented"…

Nim is different. Advanced but pragmatic type system, macros, native compilation, tiny runtime, good C interop - no language I know of offers quite the same set of features. I was very pleasantly surprised with it and decided to keep it as an "tiny, expressive, natively-compiled" solution in my toolbox.

Re: Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

#43

Post by andybak »

ebbv wrote: post #39
andybak wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying the downvote was warranted but your original comment wasn't exactly in-depth and high-quality. It was a bit lazy and off-hand. The only reason I bothered to engage with you is because I find language aesthetics fascinating and wanted to find out what your beef was.

Brief is not the same as lazy. I personally find comments that say what they mean to say in a short amount of text much more useful than ones that go on for paragraphs without saying anything new. I strive for brevity. I revised the one you responded to so you may want to check that now. As far as more details of what I don't like about Nim, that would have been easy to ask directly; I find the syntax of: echo("Hello…

> echo("Hello world!")

I'm struggling to think how different it could be.

Remove the parens? print instead of echo? It's a fairly minor point. I'm fairly very sensitive on issues of visual clutter in syntax and this doesn't bother me in the slightest.

> I far prefer the set of cases to be indented from the case statement itself.

As mentioned elsewhere this is optional but I do agree

> And the "of" on each line is redundant cruft.

I suspect there might be a good reason for needing a keyword here. I would have to dig deeper to be sure though.

Anyway - I can tolerate both of those. Any language with significant white-space and no curly-brackets is off to a good start aesthetically in my books. Skimming through the tutorial shows remarkably few horrors even when doing some moderately advanced stuff e.g. http://nim-lang.org/tut2.html#generics

Re: Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

#44

Post by bsaul »

Anyone knows what kind of project would nim be a good choice for at the moment ? I mean both the language feature as well as available libs. I think i've read somewhere that web server coding isn't a target yet (at least regarding websockets use, which was my primary concern at the time i looked).

Re: Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

#45

Post by commentzorro »

gfasdgsfd wrote: post #8
commentzorro wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, congratulations on the new version. Been playing since 0.9.2 and I hope to try this latest version too. But, please make a zipped portable version available for Windows. You don't have to include a binary version of Nim (although that would be nice) but do put the required MinGW pieces off a subdirectory under Nim as was done with earlier releases. This allows unzipping to a thumb drive, xcopy installs, and us…

It looks like mingw provides a non-installer version of the binaries, although it is (unintentionally) well hidden in the web. http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-w64/files/Toolchains%2...

I see that, thanks. It's a zipped dump of all pieces for all OSes. If you're a Nim dev, please don't let this dissuade you from eventually releasing a portable "ready to go" version of Nim for Windows.

I know myself and my compatriots bail at any language that forces Cygwin or MinGW and has its own installer on top of that. I'll never get to try OCaml, Haskell, Kitten [which looks really interesting but relies on Haskell], and a number of other new languages just because of the install burden.

IMO, if trial and adoption are your goals then as little friction as possible to get to "hello world" is a good route. (And an unzip to the directory of your choice then a double click on "Test_Hello_World.bat" are about as good as you could get.)

Re: Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

#46

Post by dom96 »

bsaul wrote: post #44

Anyone knows what kind of project would nim be a good choice for at the moment ? I mean both the language feature as well as available libs. I think i've read somewhere that web server coding isn't a target yet (at least regarding websockets use, which was my primary concern at the time i looked).

It's definitely a good time to get started with web server coding. While a websockets Nimble package is still not available there is a good excuse to write one now that the new async await support is implemented.

As far as web frameworks go I have written one called Jester (https://github.com/dom96/jester). I'll be releasing version 0.1.0 of it soon.

Re: Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

#47

Post by dom96 »

ebbv wrote: post #41
dom96 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As far as more details of what I don't like about Nim, that would have been easy to ask directly; I find the syntax of: > echo("Hello world!") Would you prefer System.out.println("Hello world!"); instead? > I far prefer the set of cases to be indented from the case statement itself. You can in fact do that, it is however optional. > And the "in" on each line is redundant cruft. Not sure what you mean here. "in" is…

> Would you prefer System.out.println("Hello world!"); instead? This is why I didn't get into details originally because I knew I would get this kind of response. You know full well that's exactly the opposite of what I mean. You're being an asshole for no reason. > Not sure what you mean here. "in" is only used in for loops. I meant the "of"s, of course.

> You know full well that's exactly the opposite of what I mean. You're being an asshole for no reason.

I apologise if I came out sounding like an asshole, but I honestly am not sure what syntax you would prefer. Any chance you could show me?

Re: Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

#49

Post by klibertp »

ebbv wrote: post #33
vbit wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to give an example of a language you find beautiful?

First, I have never and probably would never use the word "beautiful" to describe any code. I purposefully chose "clean and nice" in my last comment. As far as the new crop of languages go, I think Rust and Go both offer better refinements of older languages than Nim does. If you're going to come out with a new language, the syntax of it should be cleaner and easier to read than what you are replacing (in this case,…

I downvoted you because what you say is both wrong and harmful.

This:

> I find this language pretty ugly. And [...] that's enough reason to not use it.

is the worst possible way of choosing a language to use. It's simply stupid to dismiss languages which may suit your current problem on the grounds of aesthetics. I can't imagine a single situation where "disregarding technical advantages" of a language would be even remotely related to the right thing to do.

And this:

> syntax of it should be cleaner and easier to read than what you are replacing

is another pile of misconceptions: no, designing your syntax by comparison to other languages instead of designing it to fit your semantics is NOT a good idea; there of course IS a point in creating languages even if syntax is not "better" in any way (because semantics matter too) and no, you should NOT try to make your syntax "easy to read" but rather simple and consistent, which will make it easy to read without you even trying. At least "easy to read" to those programmers who are able to work with more than one syntax flavour; the rest will have a hard time reading anything anyway, so there's not much you can do about them.

I made learning all the languages I can a hobby of mine quite a few years ago and I since learned many very, very different syntaxes: look at Prolog, Forth, Scheme and J for the most basic examples. And what I learned is that they all work and work well, despite not being "clean and easy to read" for people who don't know them. It's normal; what's wrong however is trying to make your ignorance into some kind of generally applicable law and judging languages based on it instead of first learning a bit about them.

Now, I'm sorry for being rude, and a little ranty, but I found your suggestion that I'm a part of "groupthink mob" rather offensive.

Re: Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

#50

Post by JasonFruit »

So far, Nim has passed the most basic test for me: it installs according to instructions and compiles its own example code. I'm always baffled by the number of language releases that don't reliably do that.

Nim looks like a worthwhile language, and I'm looking forward to learning it.

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