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Nim Advocacy and Promotion Strategies

forum.nim-lang.org

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Re: Nim Advocacy and Promotion Strategies

#31

Post by melling »

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…

That's not true. Being the first few people means that the tools are not developed, common questions aren't answered, books aren't written, getting help is difficult, etc.

There are only 18 questions on StackOverFlow, for example:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/nim

People don't want to burn too many cycles discovering how the language works.

Re: Nim Advocacy and Promotion Strategies

#32

Post by lmm »

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?

Nim is relatively immature and I would expect you will spend time fighting the FFI. I mean, PyQt is wonderful, brilliant, possibly the best GUI toolkit I've ever used anywhere, and very mature and backed by a company that does nothing else - but I still spent time fighting the FFI.

If you want to play around with the language then great, but I suspect you'll spend more time running into bugs than writing your actual program. Which may be fine; certainly it'll be a learning experience.

Re: Nim Advocacy and Promotion Strategies

#33

Post by the_real_bto »

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".

I like this use case. I've had the misfortune of trying to cross compile Python for ARM. It's very difficult, because the build process runs the freshly compiled python executable. This obviously doesn't work when you are compiling an ARM executable on an x86 machine. The answer for us was to use Scratchbox [0]. This let us run the compilation on an emulated ARM machine.

In case anyone is wondering: The actual platform was Chumby [1], and Python ran great on it. We had a little twisted [2] application that displayed images and played sound. To display the images we just wrote an image file (after using PIL to manipulate it) to /dev/fb. It was really fun! I just double checked the hardware the chumby: A 350 MHZ ARM9 processor with 64 megabytes of SDRAM. It sounds a little crazy to me now to think of transforming images using PIL in 64 megabytes of ram, but it actually worked quite well.

[0] http://www.scratchbox.org/

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby

[2] https://twistedmatrix.com/trac/

Re: Nim Advocacy and Promotion Strategies

#34

Post by vardump »

bwilliams wrote: post #29
vardump wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An aesthetically nice website is a neutral or a negative signal when it comes to technical subjects, like computer languages. Content first, graphical design is completely secondary. Just need to represent information about the technical subject clearly. If the technical merits are there, adopters will come. Technical people are not baffled by $animal . $excrement. Instead, it puts them off. Edit: I get downvoted a l…

That kind of thinking will only prevent adoption, not help it. Aesthetics are important to technical subjects as well. It shows that a lot of time and consideration have gone into every part of the project, not just the technical side. It's also a good sign of community support/interaction. I will agree that content is the most important, but you shouldn't write off aesthetics so easily, especially when you want peop…

Try to google some popular languages. Use http://archive.org/ to see how their respective pages looked like in the past. I find it hard to believe aesthetics helped their adoption.

Interesting article, related to web design and conversion rate:

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/shocking-truth-about-graphics/

Re: Nim Advocacy and Promotion Strategies

#35

Post by trwired »

Cyther606 wrote: post #26
trwired wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have some experience using C++ with both Qt and wxWidgets, but I am looking for an excuse to learn something new. And a systems language with Python inspired syntax and comparable expressiveness that is suitable for creating GUI apps is something that would definitely make me want to investigate Nim further.

You may be in luck: https://github.com/filcuc/NimQml

Thank you for the link, but I can reasonably expect that Qt bindings for Nim either exist or will become available soon, as most languages that get any traction get them. I still don't know, however, if it's a good choice to try and put a GUI app together in Nim. Will it surprise me with a huge binary, like Rust does? [1] Will it be easy to develop in it on multiple platforms? I can find all those things myself, but in the spirit of what the OP describes as putting the best foot forward, I'd like to be able to quickly assess whether the language is potentially a better choice to solve my next problem than those I already know or am planning to learn.

[1] - http://endl.ch/content/cxx2rust-pains-wrapping-c-rust-exampl...

Re: Nim Advocacy and Promotion Strategies

#36

Post by Symmetry »

def- wrote: post #16
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 lan…

Would the Dobbs article be enough to get it reinstated then? http://www.drdobbs.com/open-source/nimrod-a-new-systems-prog...

Re: Nim Advocacy and Promotion Strategies

#37

Post by def- »

Symmetry wrote: post #36
def- wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lan…

Would the Dobbs article be enough to get it reinstated then? http://www.drdobbs.com/open-source/nimrod-a-new-systems-prog...

No, since it's written by Araq, the creator of Nim.

Re: Nim Advocacy and Promotion Strategies

#40

Post by IndianAstronaut »

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…

This is akin to saying a startup should thrive only on its merits alone and not use any marketing. Not going to work.
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