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Nim Programming Language Gaining Traction
An anonymous reader writes: Nim is a young, statically typed programming language that has been getting more attention recently. See these articles for an introduction: What is special about Nim?, What makes Nim practical? and How I Start: Nim. The language offers a syntax inspired by Python and Pascal, great performance and C interfacing, and powerful metaprogramming capabilities. The author of "Unix in Rust" just abandoned Rust in favor of Nim and some early-adopter companies are starting to use it as well.
When that comes out - I'm buying it regardless of whether or not I actually need to learn or use the language.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I lurk on the Nim IRC channel sometimes. The toxicity there is unbelievable.
Look at these recent IRC logs, for example.
We see insults like:
And there's lots of unnecessary sarcasm:
Then there's lunacy and quasi-psychotic ranting and rambling:
Nim is just yet another statically-typed GC language with an unsafe escape hatch. I can get the same thing (and much better syntax) with Java and JNI or C# and P/Invoke. Yawn.
Rust, on the other hand, is something genuinely new: it provides completely memory safety without a requiring a garbage collector at all. It's sad to seeing people switch from Rust to Nim: they're often too inexperienced to know what they're giving up, and I feel like they're seeking (syntactic) novelty, not a programming environment that's actually useful.
The second for loop should be indented. I have trouble believing that you really think the non-indented version is more readable, or conveys the algorithmic intent well. If you were applying for a job with my team and you made this argument, I would find it very difficult to hire you.
Alternate interpretation: nicely trolled. I bit.
What we need more of is science!
Thank you. The "why don't you like indentation?" argument is nothing but a ridiculous straw man...the issue is not the use of indentation to reflect structure (which, as you point out, Python actually interferes with in some cases...it gets worse with higher dimensional cases such as voxel maps), it's with the lack of properly delimited blocks. With blocks being implied by indentation, you lose an important visual anchor and cross-check of intent with the compiler, and what do you gain? Potential problems with tab characters, code truncation errors that are undetectable until you attempt to execute the code, huge headaches if you have to use code that has had its indentation broken...there are no positives here, unless the proponents are seriously objecting to the onerous burden of typing a few } characters or "end" keywords.
Indentation significance is a design flaw, and it's disappointing to see it repeated yet again...
Scoping by invisible characters is bad enough but modifying operator precedence by invisible characters? Why do people think that using spaces, the invisible character, as syntactically meaningful characters is a good idea? For readers of English the space is only important to separate meaningful bits and now we have a language that you will need to count spaces to determine operator precedence?!?! Of course it always cooler to use binary progressions so the operator precedence feature uses sequences of 1, 2 4, and 8 spaces. I can only hope that the language is a joke as per it's original name, nimrod.
Maybe it would be useful if they dumped the space dependency, but after reading that I quit taking it seriously.
nim, like python, requires strict indentation. That's not comfortable for some people. I, for one, have nystagmus and find it practically impossible to code in python. I suspect I'd have the same issues with nim.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
As I have recently found out, that also affects the code generation.
It is hard to generate Python code, without actually analyzing what's precisely is being generated. If source is 100% generated - it is doable, relatively easy. But generally generated code also contains pieces of user code, which might/might not require its own indentation and also reindentation to make it proper part of the generated code.
If Python at least allowed optional block statement - curly brackets or begin/end or whatever. But nope. It is appears to be sort of a religious issue for the language creator and some of his followers.
I personally do not like Python for that reason. I prefer to have a visual marker that block is closed. You know, like a dot at the end of the sentence.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
OK, you can consider Python as a heavily standardized version of indentation. Python's entire objective is the human reader. It doesn't leave you and 10 other developers from "tweaking the indentation from time to time to make [their own] point toward the human reader". What people don't understand is that one's interpretation of what they write could be different from others. What one finds easier to understand, others find harder.
There have been countless times that I have read really good Java and C code and could start picking out which individual developers developed where. Do you know how much start up time is wasted in learning Dev1, Dev2's... DevXs' version of the C language? And if you touch C++... each dev has "minor versions" as they learn new ways of doing the same thing. And these code reviews are done in highly standardized environments with docs and comments. Still each developer gets their own unique version of a standardized language. And don't get me started on Perl or Ruby. There are no such things, there are just a ton of individual essays that the Perl and Ruby interpreters understand and execute.
With Python, there is still a lot of uniqueness among developers, but you really need to look for it at the higher levels. Like method & class relationships, program execution flows, or logic design. But at the low level of reading & understanding code from a team of developers, it is dead easy. There are slight variations, but not enough to need to learn that style of coding to help in the future. That is the benefit of Python, its a global coding standard that's built into the language itself. Something that development companies spend far too much money [re]implementing every year for their dev teams.
Now, I am not saying this is best or the way it should be done. Its just one standard where none really exist.