[ellimilial]

A context might be useful.

From what I gather, the author is a researcher in bioinformatics related field. This may indicate that they tend to work either alone or in a relatively small group. The domain is small scope data processing/manipulation, research/exploratory code, ,likely short-lived or even one-off.

The progress in this context will possibly be governed by sheer processing speed (e.g. it’s unlikely anyone will delve deep into the code, a lot of iterations to ‘just get it done’ instead of testing etc.).

If this is more or less correct, the point that Nim might be more useful than Python for the author sounds very sensible to me. It’s a nice spot between command line tools and more functionality-loaded languages.

[benjamin-lee]

Author here. This is spot on. The majority of the code I write is either piping data around to existing tools using shell scripting and Snakemake or writing the data processing code myself when there isn't a tool that does what I need. Usually, I'm working alone or with a few other computational biologists. Many of my scripts are one-off but they have the distinct tendency of growing in complexity and scope if they are useful. That's one of the big advantages with Nim in my mind: you can write a quick and dirty script and have it be pretty fast and then go back later and optimize it to a few percent of C without having to rewrite your code in another language. In this sense, it's quite like Julia (another really good language).