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Nim Advocacy and Promotion Strategies

forum.nim-lang.org

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11–20 of 59 posts

Re: Nim Advocacy and Promotion Strategies

#11

Post by klibertp »

bjourne wrote: 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…

> Nim: "no idea what to write here"

That's a good point. One could try "faster, safer Python" here, but I agree that it should be discussed and made official, so that anyone seeing Nim's homepage would immediately know what it's about.

Re: Nim Advocacy and Promotion Strategies

#12

Post by eaurouge »

trwired wrote: post #8

I am looking for a systems programming language that would work well with battle prooven GUI toolkits such as Qt. Would Nim be a good choice?

Writing Qt-flavored C++ was a lot of fun last I tried it (some five years ago). And now there's QML. Have you tried writing your entire project in Qt? It may be a smoother experience than you think.

Re: Nim Advocacy and Promotion Strategies

#13

Post by proveanegative »

hahainternet wrote: post #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 shoul…

>For fuck's sake, focus on improving the language and this will come organically.

I don't have statistics to back it up but I would wager that waiting for users to come organically is among the top reasons software projects of any kind fail. Why should programming languages be special in this way?

Re: Nim Advocacy and Promotion Strategies

#15

Post by detaro »

eaurouge wrote: post #9
bjourne wrote: 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".

Won't Rust and Go likely get there equally easy?

Re: Nim Advocacy and Promotion Strategies

#16

Post by def- »

cormullion wrote: post #14

Perhaps they could fix the Wikipedia and Wikibooks presence? Has it really been "banned" from Wikipedia?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

> Lacks reliable independent secondary sources to establish notability as required by WP:GNG. Every source is WP:PRIMARY. Every one of them. Googling turned up posts to online discussion forums but nothing useful. Additionally, I note that the decision to delete at the previous AfD was unanimous for the same reasons.

> Perhaps think of it this way: a language becomes notable when people who haven't been involved in its creation start writing about it. If/when this language gets to that point you'll have no problem creating an article. At the moment, though, there just hasn't been enough uptake to get the coverage we need for notability.

Re: Nim Advocacy and Promotion Strategies

#18

Post by Symmetry »

bjourne wrote: 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…

For me the big selling point is being able to do so many things at compile time. Stuff like

  const lookupTable = veryComplicatedFunctionCall()
or letting you declare types differently depending on compile time specifications. And then there's the macro system which I haven't really used but seems pretty nice.

So maybe "C with a macro system that's safe and does everything you always wanted it to do"?

As someone who does a lot of work on microcontrollers where there's no filesystem to read in configurations from and where small binary sizes count this is all very exciting for me.

Re: Nim Advocacy and Promotion Strategies

#19

Post by dom96 »

bjourne wrote: 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…

The reason I use Nim is because it is a compiled Python with static types, generics and very powerful macros.

When I say "powerful macros" I really do mean it. I wrote what is essentially the equivalent of C# async await using only Nim's powerful metaprogramming.

Re: Nim Advocacy and Promotion Strategies

#20

Post by okasaki »

fsloth wrote: post #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 tuto…

The package manager Nimble is written in 800 lines of Nim: https://github.com/nim-lang/nimble/blob/master/src/nimble.ni... Maybe that would satisfy (a)
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