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Comment by ausjke | Hacker News Reader

More and more new languages are coming out these days.

Language is not just about a compiler and a better syntax, it is a huge ecosystem too, which either means a successful community(e.g. Python) or backed up by big guys(Google, Facebook,etc)

Life is short, for product development I am stuck with C, Python, Java, HTML/CSS/JS, SQL, that's about it and they're already more than I need and more than I can handle. Other than these obvious ones I may learn a little rust and dart in 2019, rust in particular seems interesting as a great fit to write standalone utilities.

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Nim has been around a while. I’ve been following it for almost two years and recently started writing real projects in it. I just want to say that the community growth and activity has really impressed me lately.

Nim is older than Go.

Yes, but Go got Google at its back, and it made a huge difference. You either have a successful community, or a big entity, otherwise it's hard to have an ecosystem that is good enough for serious usage

So, why use Go then? Java and C# will beat in every metric you have listed here.

Maybe not on the “life is short” metric. It is insanely fast to write production grade code in Go :)

Not really, Go is way more verbose than Python and Nim and the latter provides static typing.

As someone who also develops in Python and Nim, I respectfully disagree. There are a lot of use cases where I would pick them over Go, but the important term here is “production grade”.

Sure, you can bootstrap something really quickly in Python and Nim, but when it comes to creating beefy APIs, I find that Go offers a much shorter development cycle. Sure it is slightly more verbose, but when your code compiles it usually works (which is partly due to the way Go deals with errors). If you need to handle a large number of requests, scaling with Go is a breeze and a nightmare in Python.

IT really depends on what you're doing.

I'm inferring from the list of languages you described above that you're doing a lot of line-of-business applications where, yeah, it's almost essential to have that huge, Java or Python sized ecosystem.

Nim doesn't have that. But Nim isn't really aimed at that kind of work, either. What it does have is very good C/C++ interop, which means that it's easy to interface with existing low-level libraries. That makes it a pretty decent option for writing low-level bits, or looking to incrementally migrate from C/C++ to something a bit more modern.

For the mostly-Java stuff I'm working on, I rather wish the native components were written in something like Nim. They'd be easier to maintain if they were.

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