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NimConf 2026: Dates Announced, Registrations Open

nim-lang.org

31–33 of 33 posts

Re: NimConf 2026: Dates Announced, Registrations Open

#31
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The creator has been consistently clear in his take on "Why Nim?" It's a general purpose systems programming language, favoring procedural style, that's superior (or aims to be) in a variety of ways compared to whatever else you've been using. Hubris? Maybe. In practice, it's turned out to be an "expert's tool" that's more expressive-convenient than C/++ to do all manner of things in the realm of systems programming,…

You could have written the same about D, Haxe, Roc, or any other language in this space. Every year millions of university students design new languages across the globe on their compiler classes. To productise any of them, there is a whole ecosystem that needs to be added on top, editors, graphical debugging, packages, AI tooling....

Yep, precisely this. There are many languages out there that would have remained niche if it wasn't for a company sponsoring their development. Go is one of those. Rust too, and it just barely managed to get the critical mass it needed, likely because Mozilla had nowhere near the might of Google.

Nim had a real chance at gaining a foothold, it just needed a company to back it. I think sadly that ship has sailed by now.

Re: NimConf 2026: Dates Announced, Registrations Open

#32
post #3

I should give a talk. About what however? I’ve been happy with my progress on FigDraw (1), a 2D UI scene renderer using SDFs. Even made my own neovim ui shell with it! 1: https://github.com/elcritch/figdraw

Oooo... That looks like it could make a great talk! Do you have examples of the neovim ui shell?

Thanks! https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/13804#83737

Re: NimConf 2026: Dates Announced, Registrations Open

#33
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I think LLMs really help with the chicken-egg situation in language adoption. Contrary to many opinions that predict programming homogenizing around the big 3 languages that exist today (because that's what the LLMs currently write) I think in the future more nice languages will gain adoption as they are written by LLMs, who as you note don't care about a lack of community surrounding those langs -- if they need…

Python is a way, is Lisp's revenge after its AI winter dismissal. Finally, due to AI market share pressure, JITs in Python are a real thing, after all those years of PyPy being largely ignored.

Working in Python feels like cruel punishment to a present-day Lisp person who had nothing to do with the AI winter; Lisp clearly chose the wrong target for its revenge.
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