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Mastering Nim – now available on Amazon

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Re: Mastering Nim – now available on Amazon

#21
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An e-book is going to heavily (and negatively) impact the sales figures for the print book. So I wouldn't hold out for that. Looking at the price of the book, he wants to make money from it, so no e-book is probably the right strategy.

> An e-book is going to heavily (and negatively) impact the sales figures for the print book. Well, if the price is the same, that hardly matters? Or are you implying unpaid/illicit downloads will be worse with a legal digital version as opposed to an illicitly scanned copy? After buying an e-reader I can't defend buying print books from an environmental standpoint - it may be a sunk cost/resources fallacy - but with…

You can read a print book without wasting electricity every time you open it and the toxic materials used to produce a e-reader.

Reading print is still a much more enjoyable experience (except in the tub -- a waterproof Kindle is still great and lightweight for that!), especially with the slow speed of e-ink screens.

I can't defend ebooks compared to the reading, sharing, and the later selling at a used book store my cast-off print books.

I've even gotten O'Reilly books from a decade ago at used book stores that are great to read and look great on my shelf, and I love finding some old novel by some forgotten author instead of whatever the latest Amazon bestseller is.

And I don't have to worry about the Orwellian deletion of my books from my e-reader: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18am...

Re: Mastering Nim – now available on Amazon

#23
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An e-book is going to heavily (and negatively) impact the sales figures for the print book. Well, if the price is the same, that hardly matters? Or are you implying unpaid/illicit downloads will be worse with a legal digital version as opposed to an illicitly scanned copy? After buying an e-reader I can't defend buying print books from an environmental standpoint - it may be a sunk cost/resources fallacy - but with…

You can read a print book without wasting electricity every time you open it and the toxic materials used to produce a e-reader. Reading print is still a much more enjoyable experience (except in the tub -- a waterproof Kindle is still great and lightweight for that!), especially with the slow speed of e-ink screens. I can't defend ebooks compared to the reading, sharing, and the later selling at a used book store my…

Nevertheless, many people like ebooks, for a variety of reasons. And I'll put the marginal environmental cost of another book on my reader, against the cost of producing and shipping a physical book, and then turning on a lamp to read it at night anyway.

Re: Mastering Nim – now available on Amazon

#25
I've liked Nim for years. Just jumped back in to use with the Godot engine. I originally went with rust (not by choice but due to an important dependency), and switching to Nim made me so much more productive. In this case I don't think rust was really adding much safety since the engine owns all the game objects.

Re: Mastering Nim – now available on Amazon

#27
post #16

I absolutely hate Nim for spoiling pretty much all other programming languages for me. I wish it gained more traction. Congratulations on your book and keep up the great work, Araq. You did an outstanding job with Nim and I wish you all the best!

Even Rust?

Nim gives you like 85% of the performance of Rust without having to worry about a borrow checker. It also solves concurrency problems via its use of Channels, like Go.

So it's just hard to justify using Rust, for me. Unless you're writing a DB or something where a GC is a no go. But Nim's memory management seems pretty good, and many things are stack allocated.

Re: Mastering Nim – now available on Amazon

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s how I feel about Elixir. Everything else just feels wrong now. I’d be curious to get your Nim highlights.

I think Nim does DSLs particularly well and is the performant option for the Python class of scripty general purpose languages. I personally prefer more state controlled languages (Clojure, Rust) but I've considered pushing for Nim on shared/work projects. The main reason I haven't is network effects. The language niceties compared to other scripty general purpose languages aren't going to make up for the time spent…

Odd, I've really yet to run into a key library that I needed and couldn't find. Not all libraries are listed in Nimble too. Granted I've not done much web server stuff in Nim. Sometimes a library needed a bit of polish, which is usually trivial given how concise they are. I've actually had better luck with it than say with Elixir on anything not web related. Occasionally I've needed to wrap or convert some C code on non-embedded projects.

Re: Mastering Nim – now available on Amazon

#29

I absolutely hate Nim for spoiling pretty much all other programming languages for me. I wish it gained more traction. Congratulations on your book and keep up the great work, Araq. You did an outstanding job with Nim and I wish you all the best!

That’s how I feel about Elixir. Everything else just feels wrong now. I’d be curious to get your Nim highlights.

Elixir is not bad, but I definitely prefer static typed languages now after getting more into TypeScript. Not having types just feels wrong now.

Re: Mastering Nim – now available on Amazon

#30
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This appears to have been fixed in the Amazon page I just pulled up. If so, that was a quick edit.

It's still there, at least on Amazon.com. I haven't checked other Amazon sites.

Looks to be fixed on Amazon.com: https://i.imgur.com/twYEtb3_d.webp?maxwidth=760&fidelity=gra...
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