Nim programming language finally hit 1.0

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Wednesday, 2 October 2019 at 11:00:41 UTC, Chris wrote:
> I don't know, but I'm sure they have carefully crafted special 
> purpose tooling around their D code (else you cannot work with 
> D anyway).

That is the impression I am getting.

> Apparently, Facebook has dropped active D development. I'm 
> always skeptical when I hear "X is using D now." People often 
> say that D needs a big player behind it, but the big players 
> actually have to be very careful with exotic languages. If it 
> doesn't scale, they cannot use it. It's not that they're all 
> knobs adopting the latest hipster fashion or sticking to old 
> technologies. They simply cannot risk to be stuck with an 
> exotic language.

Right, most larger companies have used multiple languages, but 
there is a big difference between trying out a new tool on some 
smaller projects and going for it for larger critical 
applications.

> Smaller organizations that operate within very special 
> scenarios can afford to use D and it might give them an edge 
> over their competitors.

Startups is not the best canary as startups have less 
risk-aversion and technology choices are more influenced by the 
preferences of the initial staff. They usually don't have enough 
experience with the task at hand when they start out to properly 
evaluate the tradeoffs, although since they often are 
cash-restricted they might go with what they think is the cheaper 
alternative (or "productivity" as you mentioned). How that works 
out is difficult to assess. No (sane) company will speak in 
negative terms about their tech-choices publicly of course, as it 
would undermine themselves in terms of PR. Thus it is also very 
difficult to assess what they say (they tend to speak positively 
about the tech they choose) and one has to assess how they expand 
into the tech platform as time goes on.