Nim programming language finally hit 1.0

[Chris]

On Thursday, 26 September 2019 at 16:04:18 UTC, bachmeier wrote:

> Python is also used for a lot of "real" programming tasks these 
> days.

I know, but that doesn't mean it's a good choice. I suppose 
people (say scientists) just started with little scripts and then 
kept on using the language they already knew when things got 
bigger. A lot of that "real" stuff is not used in contexts where 
performance is crucial (e.g. real time) and believe me, it's 
really annoying if you get a great piece of software / research 
in Python that is completely useless in terms of developing a 
product where performance is crucial. And you cannot simply 
rewrite it, because it depends on loads of other Python modules 
developed by other scientists etc. And, of course, they used 
Python, because of all the useful modules...it's a vicious circle.

> D is perfectly suited for scripts of 200 lines. Moderate-sized 
> programs typically start as small scripts and grow over time. 
> You don't have to convince anyone to switch languages if they 
> start out with D.

It is, but who will adopt an exotic language like D for 
scripting? D is "too much" for that, and it lacks the libraries 
Python has. Plus, everybody else uses Python etc. Do you really 
want to market D as a scripting language? It clearly isn't a 
scripting language. It's more like C++, Java and C# - and who's 
gonna learn D for scripting tasks? The learning curve is too 
steep. D is not a trivial language at all. Python is better 
suited for that.

> Neither Walter or Andrei has a scripting background, rather 
> they are from the large-scale enterprise software world, and 
> that led to the current emphasis on that segment. There's no 
> reason the community can't pick up the ball and carry it into 
> other arenas.

I don't think that's gonna work (see previous paragraph). The D 
community shouldn't be delusional about software and why / how 
it's adopted. There are both technical and socio-dynamic aspects 
to it. I think Nim and maybe Zig are much more realistic about 
things. (Btw, Nim's forced indentation might be a good marketing 
strategy to get Python devs on board. It might work.)

D has become too intellectual, i.e. playing with ideas and 
abstract concepts have become more important than the real world. 
And the problem is that this playing around with ideas has 
negatively affected the use of D in the real world. Once the D 
community gets over that, D might have a convincing "story" (it 
did when I first started to use it, in ~2010 I think).