What makes Nim practical?

Post by xkarga00 » Sun, Jan 25, 2015, 3:51 PM UTC

gnuvince wrote: post #128

xkarga00 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read both the submission and the articles that exist inside that Quora link you posted and I am still not convinced. IMO what makes a language better is end products and not features. When Rust becomes stable, its community will produce great software but I don't think all of the rest languages you mentioned have produced (or will do) better software than Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift, etcd, btcd, and a ton of o…

> IMO what makes a language better is end products and not features. It's useful to distinguish between "the language" and "the tool". Some programming languages are terrible from a language design perspective (PHP, JavaScript, MATLAB), but they still have great tools (IDEs, build tools, package managers) and libraries to help programmers create good and interesting software.

The tooling around Go is good but not that great. What makes Go better than all those languages is that it's more complete: a language that does not get into your feet, good tooling, great community, and more. IMHO saying that a language is better or worse based only on "the language" is silly.

Post by pekk » Sun, Jan 25, 2015, 7:19 PM UTC

pekk wrote: post #98

iopq wrote: post #5

I just realized something: Nim is like a faster Python or a better Go lang It's not really competing in quite the same space as say, D or Rust. It's like a statically typed scripting language.

Nim can't be a faster Python when it isn't a Python, but a much younger language which lifts a few cosmetic choices but intentionally breaks with Python in large ways. If it is trying to replace Python, many of these breaks are poorly chosen and reflect a lack of understanding of why Python and its ancestors were unique. Aside from this, many of the practical refinements of Python are dropped in favor of fancy and sh…

It really makes no sense that saying "Nim is better than Python" is an acceptable opinion, but "no, it isn't" is not an acceptable opinion to HN.

Re: What makes Nim practical?

Re: What makes Nim practical?