[nbeleski]

I used AoC to try and learn a bit of Nim as I liked the idea of writting simple scripts that could run many times faster than Python. I somewhat regret it though.

I actually considered Rust given its popularity. I program C++ for a living, but I'd love to find some use for Rust.

Rust will probably my language of choice for this year's challenge.

[hnbroseph]

what kind of regrets do you have?

[nbeleski]

I haven't used Nim for anything else since then. If I had to give a simplified critique, the language in itself is still springing to life and the user base and documentation are small.

I currently don't have the time to sink into something that could end up being a gimmick only, while there is some hardcore optimization needed in one of our services that could be approached through a better parallelization using Rust.

While from my point of view Nim is only interesting, Rust on the other hand seems promising. (I don't mean to compare different purpose languages, the problem stands on my spare time to study and the company needs, if that makes sense.)

[dom96]

Hey! Nim core dev here. I was going to offer my support when I saw your original comment but based on your critique so far there isn't that much that I can do, other than keep doing what I'm doing already (evangelizing Nim as much as I can).

This kind of thing does really worry me though, it's almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy, you aren't going to use Nim because you think there isn't enough people using it :(

Do you have any ideas of how we can make you and people like you change their mind?

[nbeleski]

Hey mate, awesome you messaged! I am sincerely not skilled enough to comment on the minutia of the language. I can say I really love the idea behind it and as far as I can tell the implementation is solid.

From a end user point of view, I thought the official website and documentation felt a bit lackluster, not because it was bad or anything (the Nim tutorials part I & II are a godsend), but I instinctively compared it to languages like Python. Again, this is not a fair comparison, more like a impression. I'd love to see more blog posts like this one [0] or maybe the occasional roadmap.

Ah I understand where the 'self-fulfilling prophecy' is coming, but if anything I talked about Nim to dozens of people already, even if I can't currently find utility for it on my day job (I do ML, Embedded and Image processing, so it is actually really hard to use anything other than c++)

Again, commenting from the outside, it seems it is a hard position because today upcoming languages such as rust and go have some solid enterprise backing.

If anything, I don't think you need to change my mind! The Nim development is something I keep a close eye on and I hope I will progressively incorporate it on my daily tasks. The mentioned regret on the first post has really more to do on how little spare time I have.

[0]: https://nim-lang.org/blog/2018/06/07/create-a-simple-macro.h...