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Comment by arthtyagi | Hacker News Reader

nah man, i've tried Nim. it's meh.

Interesting. Would be cool to hear your thoughts: what was meh about it? Lack of tooling maybe?

yes exactly plus there are some things not about the language itself but the whole foundation backing it up, it lacks marketing and advocacy. It looks appealing but given that lack of marketing and popularity, it needs to have A LOT OF advantages to still be considered a contender in mainstream production environments which it fails to achieve since it doesn't really have a whole lot of advantages to it ( I'm just saying there aren't as many to back up for the flaws of it's foundation ). Hence, I don't dislike Nim at all but I don't find it good either, I find it alright.

Yeah, I completely get that. Was talking to a core dev today and he mentioned the limited tooling/ecosystem. It doesn't help when you're a competitor of either very well-established languages or ones that are backed by big corporations (e.g. Go)

You have valid points, but I’d argue that Python looked like that for much of its life. It didn’t really start to see widespread adoption until Django hit the scene - from memory, 2012-2014 was when it started to go from “esoteric scripting language” to “alternative to Ruby” and finally “default for new web backends”.

I’m very interested in Nim and try to keep up with news, but I just don’t have time for yet another language and community. That’s unfortunate because I see a lot of promise in it, and I think it would be a joy to work with every day.

I’m just quietly waiting, hoping for Nim’s Django.

Quoting from the link, this is what gets me:

Nim is case- and underscore-insensitive (except for the first character). Thus HelloWorld and helloWorld are different, but helloWorld, helloworld, and hello_world are all the same

I really don't understand this feature of the language.

It's because it integrates with C libraries where a lot of variable naming schemes could be found, and tries to let you do your thing regardless of included C libs.

Took me some time to understand to but once I tried it, it's pretty cool.

Except that Nim doesn't allow double-underscores, which show up from time to time in C.

Compiling var my__thing = 10 yields:

Error: invalid token: trailing underscore

Which is actually my biggest complaint about Nim. The error messaging is terrible, as are some of the decisions around the standard library. There's a good amount of bad and Windows-centric language there, unfortunately. Functions in the standard library like "setCtrlCHook" https://nim-lang.org/docs/system.html#setControlCHook%2Cproc...

Overall still a fan of Nim. Unlike many of the people in this thread, "marketing" is not a concern to me. I don't expect to ever program with Nim at my day job because "marketing" programmers are too dogmatic these days. Day-job languages are always going to be hypelang_2020 + dogma_patterns_v3. I very much like that the Nim community feels underground, is small and active. I hope it never suffers from the influence of modern dayjob programmers, but this is because I've seen the fun sapped out of other communities. A selfish desire, if I may.

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