[DeIlliad]

I want to get into Nim but I think the language is way too verbose for my taste. It's so similar to spoken English, even compared to Python, that it enters some sort of uncanny valley which makes reading Nim code give me a headache.

[cb321]

There may be compensating syntactic factors in the large to English word bitwise & boolean operators in the small -- such as being able to skip parentheses in command-style function call syntax and define your own operators (to bring back brevity surgically) that are even implemented as templates or macros. Maybe you can have it all? { famous last words when trade-offs rear their heads :-) }. Personally, whenever I switch from Nim to any other PL (except maybe Unix shell) things always feel much more verbose.

EDIT: For example, say you want Python's Walrus operator. You can just do this (although you can often just use a slightly more verbose parenthesized `let` expression):

    proc `:=`*[T](x: var T, y: T): T = (x = y; x)

or maybe you want `myvar |= flag` like in C/Python. You can also do that:

    proc `|=`*[T, U](a: var T, b: U) = (a = a or b)

But both of those could also be templates or macros that get the whole AST, can pick the AST apart, and emit whatever Nim code you actually want.

In fact, since Nim has nicely nested scopes & hygienic templates, you can define a bunch of operators in a library `template`, called say `unsafePtrArith` for pointer arithmetic, import that and then make them available in a little sub-scope to your code like:

    unsafePtrArith: a += 5

or

    unsafePtrArith:
      b += 4
      c += 3

[michaelsbradley]

Can you give examples?

In my experience, Nim macros (but not templates) can succumb to verbosity in their implementations because manipulation of the AST is generally imperative and can become quite involved in the details of syntax nodes.

Other than that, with the expressiveness of type definitions in Nim, my experience has been that routines often end up short and dry. Learning to wield helpers such as {.push.} and {.pop.} can be helpful in that regard, just depends on what you’re doing.

[DeIlliad]

It's been a long time so I can't give you specific examples. I'll take another stab at Nim and see if I feel the same way.