To me it is in many ways a "nicer and safer C". Sure it's not as mature as C, but what is? What it does have going for it is portability (it compiles to C so it shares C's portability), a soft real-time GC which can be manually controlled [3], generics, AST macros and much more.
The main developer being a bottleneck is one. His intense focus has led to a bunch of neat features, but it's also made the language a bit crazy and incoherent and, in some cases, unfinished -- as if the author lost interest halfway through. The syntax is beautiful in some places, weirdly warty in others (the {.pragma.} syntax is a particular eyesore). It's full of odd, quirky features that seem like the author had a sudden idea but never considered if it was a good one to give a permanent place in the language. At such a young age it already feels crufty.
Nim is also not strict enough for my taste. Supporting nil (as default behavior) in this day and age is not really acceptable.
Also I don't like the Python-style with no end-marker. I'll be glad if Araq does plan to provide another syntax for Nim. But I fear the style war in the community.
Things I like about Nim: 1. Unified function syntax call, which makes my code more OO-like. 2. Many customizable operators and easy to grasp operator precedence. 3. The pegs library is small but very nice. I began Nim programming with it, wrote handy grammar validators with it, and finally got parser trees in pure Nim for the ASTs. Really fun. Not much, because I hope Nim could be simpler and get the most practical features done right. I am dizzy with its syntax and STL now.
What are your reasons for disliking Python-like syntax?
But also because I've yet to work in any environment where broken indentation due to tools with different ideas about how to handle it has not been a regular occurrence - indentation is brittle.
(I'll also shoot whoever tells me having several syntaxes is a deal breaker.)
I am a Nim fan too, but I doubt that Nim would fulfill the requirements of the author of this article.
At the very beginning of his post, the author says, "[the language] has to be reliable. I can't afford to spend my time dealing with bugs I didn't cause myself." One of the main reasons why I abandoned Nim after having used it more or less regularly for a couple of years is that so many things are still changing, and that compiler bugs pop too often. With every new Nim release I have got unexpected problems in recompiling my codes. This is the main reason why, despite still being a Nim lover, I have stopped using it for my projects. AFAIK, there is still no idea when Nim 1.0 will be released; there have been some optimistic announcements of its being imminent, but so far none of them has lead to such a release.
Later in the blogpost, the author adds another requirement: I do not want to spend my time porting old games to new platforms, I want to make new games. I need a platform that I am confident will be around for a while. Honestly, I think nobody can be sure where Nim will be a couple of years from now. There is practically just one coder (Araq) which understand the compiler internals, and by his own admission he suffers from a severe NIH syndrome which disperses Nim's scarce manpower. As an example, a tool so potentially useful as nimsuggest has been in a non working alpha stage for years because of the lack of people able to work on it (don't know if this is still true, though). IMO, this makes the future of Nim uncertain.
Don't misunderstand me, I still love the language and wish it can reach a state similar to Rust or Julia (which have a much larger and professional community of developers and are supported financially by a number of players). But I think that promoting it in this thread is a bit out of context: Nim is good when you want to toy with a nice language which gets so many things right (macros!), not when your primary objective is to have some language that just works and can be trusted in the mid-to-long term.
Some highlights: Nimble package manager [1], Jester web framework [2], NES emulator [3], NimForum [4], SDL GUI library [5]
And if you want some smaller code examples: http://nim-by-example.github.io/, https://github.com/def-/nim-advent-of-code-2015, https://github.com/def-/nim-unsorted
1: https://github.com/nim-lang/nimble
2: https://github.com/dom96/jester
3: https://github.com/def-/nimes