<story><title>Nim Programming Language v0.16.0 released</title><url>http://nim-lang.org/news/e029_version_0_16_0.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ENTP</author><text>Nim is a language I really want to like. Having looked for a language that&amp;#x27;s 1) Cross-platform, 2) Script-like syntax and 3) C Speeds, Nim should be my ideal language. What I find though is a sense of frustration that grows over time when using it. Sometimes this stems from the quality of the documentation and other times from obscure problems that&amp;#x27;s hard to Google and get an answer for.&lt;p&gt;I do appreciate Nim, and bought Dom&amp;#x27;s book, but I feel it&amp;#x27;s missing a trick in its current state. No doubt I&amp;#x27;ll try it again as I&amp;#x27;m ever the optimist :-)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lobster_johnson</author><text>Nim is such an odd combination of &amp;quot;amazing&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;huh, that&amp;#x27;s just weird&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s a powerful theme — C-like performance with an expressive syntax and automatic memory management — that&amp;#x27;s undercut by a range of somewhat scatterbrained, idiosynchratic features.&lt;p&gt;Nim&amp;#x27;s feature set is ambitious, and it really feels like Nim&amp;#x27;s authors decided to go &amp;quot;breadth first&amp;quot; rather than &amp;quot;depth first&amp;quot;, implementing everything but the kitchen without considering that some more complicated ideas could be deferred until the core language was mature; Nim would have benefited from a more conservative, agile, minimalist approach. At least it would have allowed it to reach 1.0 and more widespread adoption earlier.&lt;p&gt;Nim also makes some design choices (first-class iterators, the case insensitivity madness, the massive amount of pragmas, OO inheritance, out arguments, etc.) that I wish would have been left on the drawing board to mature.&lt;p&gt;A casual skim through the top of the commit history indicates that Araq (Andreas Rumpf) is still doing almost all of the development. That&amp;#x27;s a red flag — being responsible for a complex language, compiler, standard library and documentation is a lot of work. (And it&amp;#x27;s of course a dangerous bus factor.)&lt;p&gt;I also think it&amp;#x27;s a mistake to charge for a book at such an early stage when the quality of the official documentation is less than stellar. dom96 is Nim&amp;#x27;s most active evangelist on HN; if he wants Nim&amp;#x27;s adoption to take off, making the book available for free should, strategically, be a no-brainer.&lt;p&gt;That said, it&amp;#x27;s not all negative. If evaluated purely on technical merits, Nim is one of the most promising languages currently in development, and it&amp;#x27;s one of the languages I intend to use this year for various smaller, experimental projects.</text></comment>
<story><title>Nim Programming Language v0.16.0 released</title><url>http://nim-lang.org/news/e029_version_0_16_0.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ENTP</author><text>Nim is a language I really want to like. Having looked for a language that&amp;#x27;s 1) Cross-platform, 2) Script-like syntax and 3) C Speeds, Nim should be my ideal language. What I find though is a sense of frustration that grows over time when using it. Sometimes this stems from the quality of the documentation and other times from obscure problems that&amp;#x27;s hard to Google and get an answer for.&lt;p&gt;I do appreciate Nim, and bought Dom&amp;#x27;s book, but I feel it&amp;#x27;s missing a trick in its current state. No doubt I&amp;#x27;ll try it again as I&amp;#x27;m ever the optimist :-)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>LordWinstanley</author><text>&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt; Sometimes this stems from the quality of the documentation.. 
&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt; I do appreciate Nim, and bought Dom&amp;#x27;s book...&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve said similar elsewhere.&lt;p&gt;The existing documentation isn&amp;#x27;t welcoming to those new to Nim. I&amp;#x27;ve read the freebie first chapter of Dom&amp;#x27;s book and it seemed very promising and I wanted to read more. However $40 for an ebook is ridiculous. I can&amp;#x27;t afford to make that kind of outlay just to see whether or not an obscure language with very little traction is worth pursuing.&lt;p&gt;I think the best solution would be for the Nim foundation to use some of that bug bounty money to buy the rights to make Dom&amp;#x27;s book freely available on The official site.</text></comment>