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Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

The language known also as n_i_m and NiM?

I was involved in programming from the very beginning (the time of KIM-1) and I learned many programming languages, the major ones (C, C++, Java, Ada, Perl, Python, ...) and also very exotic ones (Assembler, APL, Fortran, Prolog, Lisp, ...). No language was more productive for me than Nim. Ever. It's the ideal "mix" of C, Python and Lisp with C++ native performance. Nim is really nice. I wonder why it is still barely known.

http://nim-lang.org

http://hookrace.net/blog/what-is-special-about-nim/

Uses Cases:

https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/wiki/Nim-use-cases

Note that meanwhile there is also NimScript, an interpreter for a subset of Nim, which can be used for shell scripts.

Nim for scientific computing:

http://rnduja.github.io/2015/10/21/scientific-nim/

> The language known also as n_i_m and NiM?

http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-case-for-case-insensitivity...

I have no problem with that because this way everyone can use his favorite notation. The only thing that strongly reject are strong spaces. That was a silly idea and should be removed instantly.

What do you think about Julia?

I have barely touched Julia and I am impressed by the performance. It could become a real competitor to R.

Nim could also play a significant role because its syntax is similar to Python, and because NumPy is a Python API which is very prominent among scientists. However someone has yet to write a Nim library similar to NumPy.

Nim has the advantage of zero overhead to C, and it compiles to C which makes Nim an interesting option for super computing.

> Nim has the advantage of zero overhead to C,

Untrue. Nim requires the use of a garbage collector.

No. Counter example from http://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/nim/:

  # Because Nim compiles to C, FFI is easy:

  proc strcmp(a, b: cstring): cint {.importc: "strcmp", nodecl.}

  let cmp = strcmp("C?", "Easy!")

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