I read the article. Still no idea what Nim is good for and why it's better than some other language.. and for which use cases?
I read the article, and I’ve been spending the past 20 minutes looking at the SPA framework. I’m still not sure what it is or why anyone would use it. It looks extremely complicated and verbose.
Karax is very promising to me. The Nim forum was re-built with it recently: https://github.com/nim-lang/nimforum However, it has no totally no documentation, and seems super alpha.
I do not think all this language fragmentation is a good thing. A million little obscure languages that all at the end of the day do the same thing. Yeah, we need language research to keep devising new features and more efficient ways of programming, but this is different. I wish the world would get behind a couple well thought out languages that cover most programming needs (functional, systems/bare metal, scripting…
I recognize Common Lisp in your expectations :] http://lisp-lang.org/ multiparadigm, efficient, super tools (debugger, repl),…
i must admit that i'm not a big fan of nimble (nim's package manager; for a few reasons) but on the other site you have apt, pacman, yum, whatelsenot, afaik most of them are not even able to install two versions of the same library side by side. The situation is so bad that most applications these days are packed with `flatpack` or something else, because of the so broken linux package management... In contrast to eg…
> most of them are not even able to install two versions of the same library That's entirely by design. Distributions exist to provide a set of packages that are well tested, and work reliably, together. And then guarantee that such set will stay the same and receive timely security updates for 3 or 5 or more years so that people can reliably use it in production.
and in the real world you do configure; make install then ;)
edit: or docker every one i've met so far, uses docker as a kind of "package manager". Database? Oh year use this docker image, elastic search & kibana? shure docker. What they actualy want most of the time is: an easy way to install this stacks, in an non ancient version, where i can actually use the stuff i need to use.
> It uses whitespace for blocks, like Python. Why is this a con?
It's arguably more error-prone, e.g. Rob Pike justifies Go's decision to use curly braces like so: >Some observers objected to Go's C-like block structure with braces, preferring the use of spaces for indentation, in the style of Python or Haskell. However, we have had extensive experience tracking down build and test failures caused by cross-language builds where a Python snippet embedded in another language, for in…
and then you do both, indents and braces,
indents that it looks nice and braces to satisfy the machine. Then you can just omit the braces... If i would just got a penny for each time i've counted braces...
Actually, I'm curious why people don't like white space sensitive languages. I get the tab v space thing, and there are certainly a couple of other down sides, but none of these seem like deal breakers to me. Given that python was the second language I learned, it's possible that I drank the coolaid early and I'm blind to some things that are truly egregious. So the question is: why do folks completely avoid a langua…
> why do folks completely avoid a language for a single relatively bland syntactic feature? Personal preference isn't a good enough reason? I don't like white space sensitive languages because I've seen what happens in python when somebody accidentally adds a couple of lines formatted with spaces into a file formatted with tabs. I've seen git and svn mangle tabs. Long blocks are harder to track. Refactoring functions…
loosing parts of your code is bad. The same goes for braces, if you loose them in a big c program your day is ruined as well.
Post author here. A few things that make me sad in the pants: - js doesn't have source maps (kinda of a big deal to me) - some error messages are head scratchers (seem to remember trying to add things to an immutable array not being clear) - docs could use love (eg seeing more examples of macros in action) - devel (their nightly compiler) can be rough (e.g. i found the "strings cannot be null" cutover a bit rocky --…
The docs issue and devel being rough are both due to the pre-1.0 status and the smaller community. It's a little bit of a catch-22; you need adoption to gain contributors but people won't adopt until there's enough contributions to make it stable.
yeah, which is usually where big companies help out. Their respect in the tech communities makes people take note of the new technology.
I really really think "underdog" is the best way to describe Nim because of this.
Agreed. I purged a bunch of stuff and still feel like I left too much in. A couple of bonus facts for you: - they've got an effects tracking system where you can have the compiler track (and whistleblow!) which functions are pure or not - their multi-phase compiler allows you to read in source code at build time (from files or external programs!) - their macro system is typesafe as it operates at the AST level - the…
> - the guy who created it will always tell you how he feels What does this mean?
I'm guessing, but I think the OP means that the Nim creator is a bit like Linus Torvalds. He will tell you if he feels your idea is silly, especially if he's argued against that idea hundreds of times already.
I read the article, and I’ve been spending the past 20 minutes looking at the SPA framework. I’m still not sure what it is or why anyone would use it. It looks extremely complicated and verbose.
Don't know why you're being downvoted. I had the same experience reading through Karax GitHub. I might be spoiled by other docs.
Karax needs a promotional website, badly. It's a really great SPA framework and IMO is totally competitive with React.
I like the concept of Nim, as in: fast, statically typed, inferred, compiled etc. but I do not enjoy whitespace-sensitive languages, so am keeping an eye on Crystal more than Nim. If that doesn't bother you, Nim is really neat.
Nim is my first whitespace-sensitive language. I had no plans to love it. We're now engaged.