[Rebuff5007]

A grad student using a new language definitely definitely does not face any career risk IMO... I cant imagine a single professor or recruiter caring about something like this over material progress in their work.

My guess is that grad students are swamped and are looking for the shortest path to getting an interesting result, and that is most likely done with a tool they already somewhat know.

The question for Nim, like many other new products, is: why is it worth the onboarding cost?

[sevagh]

My professor would have asked me what the relevance of Nim is to the actual subject of the research. Going against the grain has a cost, unless you're studying Nim itself.

[Jtsummers]

And not only that, your code is likely to become the next student's code. The professor doesn't need to understand it, per se, but they do need to ensure it's useful for future maintainers/extenders. Will the next Aerospace Engineering grad student coming in understand Nim or be motivated enough to learn Nim and have time to continue the work? They likely already had Fortran, Matlab, or Python experience (which depends on their undergrad and when they went to school). Picking a novel language for the research group needs to have value for the group going forward, not just to satisfy the curiosity or taste of the RA.

[baq]

None, but neither is Python…?

[sevagh]

Depends on the surrounding body of work. In my case, 99% of papers in my references had Python/PyTorch implementations. Which is the entire point of this post.

[baq]

Absolutely but being the devil’s advocate here - also what does that have to do with the research?

It’s good engineering and good management but research shouldn’t really care.

[sevagh]

Fair enough. Somebody some day wrote the first paper in Python :shrug: