> I think the message is more nuanced
I thought it was more nuanced too as they were explaining how integer types can be derived, until I finished the article, and they really did just seem to be complaining that there's a mismatch between compile time and run time.
Dynamic types don't really solve the problems they mention as far as I can tell either (perhaps I am misunderstanding), they just don't provide any guarantees at all and so "work" in the loosest sense.
> otherwise wouldn't lisp with its homoiconicity and compile time macros fit the bill perfectly?
That's a good point, I do wonder why they didn't mention Lisp at all.
> we don't have a solution yet
What they want to do with print can, as far as I can see, be implemented in Nim easily in a standard, imperative form, without any declarative shenanigans. Indeed, it is implemented as part of the stdlib here: https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/blob/ce44cf03cc4a78741c423b2...
Of course, that implementation is more complex than the one in the article because it handles a lot more (e.g., formatting and so on).
At the end of the day, it's really a capability mismatch at the language level and the author even states this:
> Programming languages ought to be rethought.
I'd argue that Nim has been 'rethought' specifically to address the issues they mention. The language was built with extension in mind, and whilst the author states that macros are a bad thing, I get the impression this is because most languages implement them as tacked on substitution mechanisms (C/C++/Rust/D), and/or are declarative rather than "simple" imperative processes. IMHO, most people want to write general code for compile time work (like Zig), not learn a new sub-language. The author states this as well.
Nim has a VM for running the language at compile time so you can do whatever you want, including the recursive type decomposition (this lib isn't implementing Peano arithmetic but multiprecision stack based bignums): https://github.com/status-im/nim-stint and specifically here: https://github.com/status-im/nim-stint/blob/ddfa6c608a6c2a84...
func zero*[bits: static[int]](T: typedesc[Stuint[bits] or Stint[bits]]): T {.inline.} =
## Returns the zero of the input type
discard
func one*[bits: static[int]](T: typedesc[Stuint[bits]]): T {.inline.} =
## Returns the one of the input type
result.data = one(type result.data)
It also has 'real' macros that aren't substitutions but work on the core AST directly, can inspect types at compile time, and is a system language but also high level. It seems to solve their problems, but of course, they simply might not have used or even heard of it.