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Nim Advocacy and Promotion Strategies

forum.nim-lang.org

1–10 of 59 posts

Re: Nim Advocacy and Promotion Strategies

#2
I find it disturbing that languages are now adopting promotion strategies because not enough people are using them.

For fuck's sake, focus on improving the language and this will come organically. This isn't a competition as to who has the most popular language, and the most popular languages are always going to be total shit.

Just write good code, marketing departments are the bane of the entire IT sphere, you shouldn't be trying to create one for a niche language.

Re: Nim Advocacy and Promotion Strategies

#3

I find it disturbing that languages are now adopting promotion strategies because not enough people are using them. For fuck's sake, focus on improving the language and this will come organically. This isn't a competition as to who has the most popular language, and the most popular languages are always going to be total shit. Just write good code, marketing departments are the bane of the entire IT sphere, you shoul…

Most of these suggestions are about how to make Nim more immediately useful to people, e.g. by being more focussed, making sure important libraries are well-optimised, etc.

I think it's really good that they're asking, "why aren't more people using our language?". That seems like a great step towards improving it.

Re: Nim Advocacy and Promotion Strategies

#4

I find it disturbing that languages are now adopting promotion strategies because not enough people are using them. For fuck's sake, focus on improving the language and this will come organically. This isn't a competition as to who has the most popular language, and the most popular languages are always going to be total shit. Just write good code, marketing departments are the bane of the entire IT sphere, you shoul…

For better or worse human beings are creatures who like to categorise things. This is how we deal with complexity, even if the categories are not always optimally chosen. Marketing departments inevitably start off with pushing a category for a product and suggesting this is it's "best at" or indeed "only option" angle. This allows we category seeking beings to remember it better, and indeed, provides a secure "beachhead", even if very specific, which the product (~language) can dominate and from which it can credibly grow. Nim does not seem to have this beachhead, and basically is therefore diluted across categories and is harder to remember. I therefore agree with the original post that Nim does not have unique selling point if you will.

Separately, "marketing" is of course a term loaded with negatives, but it is essentially about communicating a benefit in a very crowded and competitive environment. That benefit has to be very clearly enunciated and pushed, and if it is a clear and simple message, then it will be effective.

It's a secondary concern that a language is a polyglot at all sorts of use cases, is good at everything. It first has to have users. Users have lots of choice so you're best off giving a small subset of them the idea that this is the perfect tool for their specific use case, and grow from there, than telling everyone this is good at everything, even if that is true.

Unfortunately the best all rounder is often forgotten if she/he's not number one at something.

TL;DR: In a crowded and complex marketplace marketing's segmentation methods are unfortunately needed.

Re: Nim Advocacy and Promotion Strategies

#5
As an engineer I would be persuaded by a) implementing something practical but simple simply, b) implementing something a bit more complex legibly and c) writing about the results which explain why they are neat.

The killer promoter is of course a book.

I usually wait before starting on new languages so I'm not slowed down by incomplete tooling, missing compiler features etc.

What really gets me going is a 1-2-3 tutorial which explains how to implement something non-trivial like calling c dlls.

Re: Nim Advocacy and Promotion Strategies

#6
Alright, then show me! For example, the beginner tutorial was linked a while ago (http://nim-lang.org/tut1.html) and I wouldn't criticize it at all, because it's well written, but it doesn't show me why I would care about Nim when there are dozens of languages I could choose instead.

It looks like Python, with a little more types.

Fwiw, I'm also a language geek and my favorite language is Factor. If I wanted to evangelize it, I could show how idiomatic Python or Haskell code translated to Factor takes up less than half or a third in size. So that's its USP (Unique Selling Point) -- really short code. What is Nim's USP?

Julia: "fresh approach to mathematical computing", Rust: "safe resource disposal without GC", Go: "C successor backed up by Google", Swift: "Replacement for Objective-C", Clojure: "Scheme on the JVM", Nim: "no idea what to write here"

Is it the Why should I be excited? paragraph: "Nim is the only language that leverages automated proof technology to perform a disjoint check for your parallel code. Working on disjoint data means no locking is required and yet data races are impossible" If I understood what the hell that means, maybe I would be excited. :)

Re: Nim Advocacy and Promotion Strategies

#7

I find it disturbing that languages are now adopting promotion strategies because not enough people are using them. For fuck's sake, focus on improving the language and this will come organically. This isn't a competition as to who has the most popular language, and the most popular languages are always going to be total shit. Just write good code, marketing departments are the bane of the entire IT sphere, you shoul…

> focus on improving the language and this will come organically

Or not. There are dozens of languages which are good, a couple of decades old, and only known and used by a very small community. They all followed your advice and in effect they "lost" man-centuries of contributions to other languages.

I don't know how well this is going to play out for Nim, but for a project which can't even have its own Wiki page because of how unpopular it is it may well be a good thing.

Re: Nim Advocacy and Promotion Strategies

#9
post #6

Alright, then show me! For example, the beginner tutorial was linked a while ago ( http://nim-lang.org/tut1.html ) and I wouldn't criticize it at all, because it's well written, but it doesn't show me why I would care about Nim when there are dozens of languages I could choose instead. It looks like Python, with a little more types. Fwiw, I'm also a language geek and my favorite language is Factor. If I wanted to eva…

I am excited about Nim because it compiles to C that can run on an ARM microcontroller. I believe this was a possibility at some point, but I don't know if this is a priority for Araq. So (personally) I see it as a (potential) "C replacement for embedded systems".

Re: Nim Advocacy and Promotion Strategies

#10
post #6

Alright, then show me! For example, the beginner tutorial was linked a while ago ( http://nim-lang.org/tut1.html ) and I wouldn't criticize it at all, because it's well written, but it doesn't show me why I would care about Nim when there are dozens of languages I could choose instead. It looks like Python, with a little more types. Fwiw, I'm also a language geek and my favorite language is Factor. If I wanted to eva…

>Clojure: "Scheme on the JVM"

That would be Kawa (http://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/).

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