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Nim 2.2.6

nim-lang.org

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Re: Nim 2.2.6

#71

Post by Ancapistani »

pansa2 wrote: post #23
treeform wrote: post #16

Thank you for working on the Nim Compiler. This is great. Another great release. The Nim Compiler continues to move forward. Thank you very much to everyone who has contributed to the development of this superior language. Nim Compiler continues to be one of the most wonderful languages I have worked with. With the speed of C and the simplicity of Python, it has allowed me to write a lot of cool software. I do not kn…

> with the simplicity of Python So, not simple at all, then? Python is a very complex language hiding behind friendly syntax. Do you just mean “with the syntax of Python”? Or does Nim’s similarity to Python go more than skin-deep?

I've used Nim a bit, though it's been a while. I've been primarily a Python developer for the past 20 years, with a sprinkling of other languages and paradigms - including languages like Scala and Haskell, so not just OOP stuff.

I characterize Nim as Python with one major difference: where Python prioritizes "developer happiness", Nim prioritized performance. As a result, the syntax looks very similar, the edges are quite a bit rougher, and performance is exponentially better.

It still "feels like" Python in a lot of ways. The ways places if differs feel a lot like Haskell IMO.

Re: Nim 2.2.6

#72

Post by archargelod »

austinjp wrote: post #61
miguel_martin wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> language like his personal compiler development playground re personal compiler development playground: I don't see this for Nim 2. Nimony/Nim3 is more of a "playground", but rightfully so: he is creating a new major version of the language and aiming to improve the architecture of the compiler. > He is also very difficult to work with and isn't very welcoming to newcomers I don't have full context on the drama beh…

> Araq will state his personal & honest opinions, which may come off as abrasive or "un-welcoming" in your opinion. I don't agree with everything he says but that's OK. Nope. This is a sop, an equivalent to the non-apology "I'm sorry you took what I said so badly". Aggression masquerading as "honesty" has no place in any organisation that wants to be taken seriously. It's most certainly not "OK" when Andreas' persona…

> Nim unfortunately has a toxic Dictator at the top

Araq has opinions that he defends, but you can and absolutely should try to sway or change them. I see this all the time on Discord and Forum. And I see people win over just as much as them losing.

I don't have a strong opinion if this is healthy or not, but it's probably why I would be a bad BDFL =). All in all, I don't think dictatorship is a right word here.

Re: Nim 2.2.6

#73

Post by Ancapistani »

tinfoilhatter wrote: post #8
synergy20 wrote: post #2

nim is memory safe, python syntax, emits c/c++/js. It really deserves more love and publicity. more mature than zig, much easier than rust.

It's too bad that the BDFL of Nim (Araq / Andreas) treats the language like his personal compiler development playground. This has led to a hard fork of the compiler, many experienced and frustrated developers leaving the community and language behind, and an extremely fragmented ecosystem. He is also very difficult to work with and isn't very welcoming to newcomers. The community "leaders" / moderation team is also…

> He is also very difficult to work with and isn't very welcoming to newcomers.

This hasn't been my experience at all.

When I first tried Nim, years ago, I came across an inconsistency in a database connector in the standard library after only a couple of weeks. I pinged him to ask if I was understanding it correctly and confirm it was a bug. He agreed it should be updated, so I put together a pull request. It was reviewed quickly, we went back and forth a couple of times over some details, he asked me to include some documentation updates, and it was merged without issue in a couple of days in total.

Given that I came to the language as a complete newcomer and had commits to the standard library less than three weeks later with the BDFL's approval, I simply can't agree that he's difficult to work with or not welcoming.

YMMV, obviously.

Re: Nim 2.2.6

#74

Post by archargelod »

tinfoilhatter wrote: post #8
synergy20 wrote: post #2

nim is memory safe, python syntax, emits c/c++/js. It really deserves more love and publicity. more mature than zig, much easier than rust.

It's too bad that the BDFL of Nim (Araq / Andreas) treats the language like his personal compiler development playground. This has led to a hard fork of the compiler, many experienced and frustrated developers leaving the community and language behind, and an extremely fragmented ecosystem. He is also very difficult to work with and isn't very welcoming to newcomers. The community "leaders" / moderation team is also…

If someone stumbles upon this comment, don't be quick to discard the Nim language. Please do your own research and make your own opinion on the matter.

I believe this and many of comments by tinfoilhatter under this post are not in good faith and in the most charitable interpretation written by a uninformed person or are severely outdated.

> Thanks for the offer, but there's a reason why Nim hemorrhages users as fast as it gains them, and a big reason for that, IMO, is the toxic community which definitely includes the moderation team.

I have to challenge this, because for the last couple years, there have been almost no incidents or drama. Moderation was almost exclusively dealing with spam messages. I think, on the forum, a couple posts were closed because of heated or offtopic discussions. But in all cases, participants were agreeing with the decision of mods (you can see them leaving a 'like' on mod's message).

> There was quite a bit of drama that caused the hard fork to materialize. Differences in communication styles is definitely describing the drama that unfolded, extremely mildly. I don't work on the fork or use it, but some of the more talented compiler developers who were previously contributing to Nim, left Nim to go work on Nimskull.

I know that some of people that left were also the ones causing problems with moderation and being toxic. I don't want anyone to draw strong conclusions, but Nim community was much healthier and friendly after the fork people and certain moderator leaving the project.

> He is also very difficult to work with and isn't very welcoming to newcomers. The community "leaders" / moderation team is also full of abrasive individuals with fragile egos.

This is just false. You can see Araq answering the noob questions on the forum all the time. He might be not the best person to do that, because his answers on the short side. I believe, noobs often need more context, examples and explanations than he's providing. But it's thought and effort that counts. Some people even hate when you treat them as complete beginner and try to nourture them common CS knowledge.

Re: Nim 2.2.6

#75

Post by lerno »

seanw444 wrote: post #60
didibus wrote: post #26

I had completely forgot about Nim. It was trending a while back, but now it seems all the fanfare is around Zig instead.

I wish for both to succeed. I'm more of a Nim guy, but it's nice that there is a modernized C-like alternative to C gaining traction. My biggest complaint about both is the lack of built-in run-time polymorphism. Rust gets you comptime and runtime polymorphism in one complete package. Nim makes use of shallow inheritance, which I find hacky, because it only lets you go one level deep. And Zig's stdlib makes it the no…

I feel qualified to offer a guess as to why: in Zig (and Odin) reuse is mainly done through what basically is templates. This reduces the need for vtables only when true ”plugin” type of objects are the only solution. For Zig and Odin, the only stdlib usages are for allocators and streams. These few usecases are way too few to motivate a full fledged interface feature, and consequently it’s not added. So it’s both a lack of usecases, as well as a desire to prefer templates over interfaces for reuse, typically due to performance concerns.

Re: Nim 2.2.6

#76

Post by tinfoilhatter »

archargelod wrote: post #74
tinfoilhatter wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's too bad that the BDFL of Nim (Araq / Andreas) treats the language like his personal compiler development playground. This has led to a hard fork of the compiler, many experienced and frustrated developers leaving the community and language behind, and an extremely fragmented ecosystem. He is also very difficult to work with and isn't very welcoming to newcomers. The community "leaders" / moderation team is also…

If someone stumbles upon this comment, don't be quick to discard the Nim language. Please do your own research and make your own opinion on the matter. I believe this and many of comments by tinfoilhatter under this post are not in good faith and in the most charitable interpretation written by a uninformed person or are severely outdated. > Thanks for the offer, but there's a reason why Nim hemorrhages users as fast…

> I have to challenge this, because for the last couple years, there have been almost no incidents or drama. Moderation was almost exclusively dealing with spam messages. I think, on the forum, a couple posts were closed because of heated or offtopic discussions. But in all cases, participants were agreeing with the decision of mods (you can see them leaving a 'like' on mod's message).

Or we could look at the project's contributor graph: https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/graphs/contributors instead of likes on moderator's posts on the forums

> I know that some of people that left were also the ones causing problems with moderation and being toxic. I don't want anyone to draw strong conclusions, but Nim community was much healthier and friendly after the fork people and certain moderator leaving the project.

What definition of the words toxic, healthy, and friendly are you using?

> This is just false. You can see Araq answering the noob questions on the forum all the time. He might be not the best person to do that, because his answers on the short side. I believe, noobs often need more context, examples and explanations than he's providing. But it's thought and effort that counts. Some people even hate when you treat them as complete beginner and try to nourture them common CS knowledge.

Maybe if he's not the best person to do that, he shouldn't be doing it? You seem to just be playing devil's advocate here, instead of offering any real example that contradicts my claims.

Re: Nim 2.2.6

#77

Post by PMunch »

tinfoilhatter wrote: post #54
PMunch wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The community "leaders" / moderation team is also full of abrasive individuals with fragile egos. I certainly hope this isn't the case any longer. As one of the moderators I feel the current group is very patient and welcoming. At least that's what we're trying for, no one is perfect so I'm certain you can find counter examples. But as a whole I think we're doing pretty well. If you have any specific complaints we…

It makes sense you feel that way, as you're one of the moderators. I feel quite differently. Thanks for the offer, but there's a reason why Nim hemorrhages users as fast as it gains them, and a big reason for that, IMO, is the toxic community which definitely includes the moderation team.

Of course, I'm heavily biased, but also very interested in mediating any such issues. I obviously can't, or wouldn't want to, force you to report anything. But it would be very appreciated if you, or anyone else reading this with similar experiences, could report it here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1ZWa2GONAM825IxFt8ZOdfn_XeJy...

Re: Nim 2.2.6

#78

Post by cepera »

austinjp wrote: post #61
miguel_martin wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> language like his personal compiler development playground re personal compiler development playground: I don't see this for Nim 2. Nimony/Nim3 is more of a "playground", but rightfully so: he is creating a new major version of the language and aiming to improve the architecture of the compiler. > He is also very difficult to work with and isn't very welcoming to newcomers I don't have full context on the drama beh…

> Araq will state his personal & honest opinions, which may come off as abrasive or "un-welcoming" in your opinion. I don't agree with everything he says but that's OK. Nope. This is a sop, an equivalent to the non-apology "I'm sorry you took what I said so badly". Aggression masquerading as "honesty" has no place in any organisation that wants to be taken seriously. It's most certainly not "OK" when Andreas' persona…

>Nim unfortunately has a toxic Dictator at the top, and his subordinates defend his behaviours. While this continues nobody should take Nim seriously.

I can mention just exactly the same pattern with one widespreaded OS that anyone is taking seriously.

And I know one very popular and often mentioned systems programming language with "community" driven design process with inclusive and stuff which is in some kind of stagnation without BDFL (async fragmented ecosystem without C++ burden of 40 years of legacy).

Why do you think that "welcoming" is a must for successful IT projeсt?

Re: Nim 2.2.6

#79

Post by planetis »

tinfoilhatter wrote: post #69
planetis wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These aren’t specifics, it’s the same tired tactic: you disagree with me, so I’ll try to ruin your reputation.

Then offer specifics that contradict mine? It should be easy if all I'm doing is being a contrarian. There are at least a few comments in reply to this post that have echoed my experiences regarding unpleasant interactions with Nim's leadership and community. I'd like nothing more than for Nim to succeed as a modern systems programming language. Unfortunately, giant egos and personalities constantly get in the way of…

Actually, that’s not far from the truth. The reasons are:

Lack of contribution. If someone isn’t doing actual programming work, doesn’t have time management to maintain libraries, or isn’t contributing successful applications, it’s hard to take constant criticism seriously.

Only showing up to complain. Some people disappear for months and then reappear only to complain about design decisions, like "Why were multimethods removed in v3?" or "Why isn’t the pragma syntax like Python’s?" That tends to lead to the assumption that the language is "someone’s toy" just because features change or it’s not a drop-in Python replacement.

Focusing on gossip instead of technical merit. Complaining that a moderator was unfriendly is missing the point. Moderators change over time. The question should be whether the language and the ecosystem are valuable to you, not whether you personally get along with every individual on the forum.

Re: Nim 2.2.6

#80

Post by tinfoilhatter »

planetis wrote: post #79
tinfoilhatter wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then offer specifics that contradict mine? It should be easy if all I'm doing is being a contrarian. There are at least a few comments in reply to this post that have echoed my experiences regarding unpleasant interactions with Nim's leadership and community. I'd like nothing more than for Nim to succeed as a modern systems programming language. Unfortunately, giant egos and personalities constantly get in the way of…

Actually, that’s not far from the truth. The reasons are: Lack of contribution. If someone isn’t doing actual programming work, doesn’t have time management to maintain libraries, or isn’t contributing successful applications, it’s hard to take constant criticism seriously. Only showing up to complain. Some people disappear for months and then reappear only to complain about design decisions, like "Why were multimeth…

Are you suggesting that the reason Nim isn't successful is everyone else's fault, and that the Nim development team and community aren't responsible for its trajectory?

I'm sorry, but not many people are going to want to use a programming language when they're mocked or insulted for simply asking questions. Nor are many people going to want to use a language where the core development team focuses on shiny new things over fixing and documenting what already exists.

Those are the main criticisms I've lobbed at Nim, and I think both are completely fair.

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