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Comment by wbhart | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you. One needs a group of like-minded individuals who understand and agree on the core design goals, but who have individual say in what they implement. Nim isn't being designed with an inferior model, it is being designed with an inefficient model. With three or four core devs, the work goes 3-4 times faster (slight exaggeration of course). That means a language can become popular in 5 years instead of 15. This is why companies love teams so much. One that works well together is worth many developers who work well alone.

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While Andreas is still doing most of the core development it is not true that he is still the sole developer of Nim. I am personally involved with a lot of work on the standard library and there are two others who also work on the compiler. We all have a say in the design of Nim. In addition to that I have built a lot of software for Nim programmers in Nim like for example Nimble and the Nim forum.

I was vaguely aware of this. But where are the major design decisions publicly discussed?

If you look at the Julia issue tracker, you'll see an enormous amount of discussion between and with core devs about language design decisions.

It's good to have someone primarily responsible for the compiler, someone responsible for libraries, another for GC, another for the package manager, etc. I'm not suggesting every core dev needs to be intimately involved with every line of code or design decision. It's more about how the development process feels to outsiders. After all, the question that was asked was about why Nim is not being hyped, rather than why is it not a fantastic language (it is fantastic).

It is great to hear about two other (albeit nameless) individuals working on the compiler though.

I will agree that discussing programming language design decisions in the open is something we have to work on. IRC unfortunately is not ideal but it is where most of these discussions take place. I am personally trying to encourage people to write RFCs on Github or on the Nim forum and there are some already there (https://github.com/Araq/Nim/labels/RFC).

I don't know much about language design, how tightly are syntactical/grammatical decisions coupled with other stuff like GC?

I understand, that, if things the language uses are implemented in that language itself, the language design breaks them. But if not?

A language like Java could probably work without GC, give the dev a "free" method and be done with it. The whole language would look the same syntactically.

Most discussions about major things occur in IRC in #nim on freenode.

> With three or four core devs, the work goes 3-4 times faster (slight exaggeration of course).

Fred Brooks would like a word...

More seriously, this is the important part:

> like-minded individuals who understand and agree on the core design goals,

A team who agrees on the big picture, but can work together to sort out the small details, is really important.

There's also balances between doing things quickly and doing things right. Sometimes, slowing down a bit gets you a significantly better end product. Sometimes it's just a slowdown.

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