Learning Programming with Nim
narimiran.github.io
narimiran.github.io
I like Nim syntax the best, and Crystal and Zim are tied for second. I don't mind a small library / ecosystem. The main things I'm interested in are:
- I want to write once and run on Windows / Linux / Mac. (I'm not writing a GUI.) - Concurrency and async capabilities - Safety guarantees (both types and threads) - Speed
I'd be interested in people's recommendations, or links to comparisons between these languages.
I've always enjoyed programming in Nim when I've had the chance. It doesn't fit all kinds of projects, but it sounds like it'll fit yours.
Zig is too young to build anything significant with it. But to me, it's the most promising language for embedded and low-level development, and where you need good control of memory management. I've played around with it a lot recently and looking forward to use it more in the future.
The other languages that you didn't mention but are worth evaluating are D and Go. Again, they have advantages and disadvantages that may make them either more or less suited to your application.
But, why do they have to hit 1.0 by the end of the year? Who's the arbiter of this deadline?
D only has advantages.
Sure some things in D are 'interesting', but it's also a very, very complex beast, full of bugs (some known, and heaps more not-known).
btw. Do not participate on the D forums either, it's just a propoganda tool for the D Foundation (i.e. they filter (or moderate as they like to call it), anything that says anything negative about d.
In the end, if D has anything interesting, that we can't live without, we can just take it and integrate it one or the many 'proper' programming languages.
Don't waste your time with d. You'll only ever end up wishing you had spent that time on a proper language, that has a well supported ecosphere.
Hardly, or half the posts would be gone :-)
What we do moderate is posts where one person harasses another. This happens only rarely, except we had a recent large volume of such coming from a Tor node. So posts coming from the Tor node need approval from one of the moderators for the time being (until that person goes away).
You can also use the NNTP interface to access the forums, which doesn't moderate in advance (that only happens if you use the web interface to post).
The web forum software is a shell around the NNTP interface. It's a bit difficult to make a HackerNews/Reddit style moderation system work on it because of the way NNTP works.
but the only ones that are considered to be harassers, or subject to moderation, are the non-members.
In addition, there is no visibility into does the moderation, how long it might take, what would be filtered, and for what reason.
Therefore the forum's use of moderation is at best, suspicious, and can easily become a tool for abuse.
There should be a record of who filters what, when, and why.
And this should be made public also (although people should not be forced to subscribe to them).
In any case, people are better of spending their time on stuff that is actually supported, and can get them employment.
If you've got specific messages in mind, email me the message numbers. Ex-post-facto moderation relies on someone letting us know of a problem message. The alternative is pre-moderation, which you've said you don't like.
> well known members of the community
Note that the troll I referred to would sock-puppet well known members, including myself.
How would you suggest dealing with such a disruptive person? (The volume of his postings, all with different pseudo-accounts, was pretty large for a while.)
> for no reason
We've posted several times that professional demeanor is expected.
I doubt other HN'ers are interested in this exchange, so I'd prefer taking it offline and you can email me. See walterbright.com for the address.
Here the list of traits that could be observed in the private complain thread:
- Grandiosity with expectations of superior treatment from other people - Fixated on fantasies of power, success, intelligence, attractiveness, etc. - Self-perception of being unique, superior, and associated with high-status people and institutions - Needing continual admiration from others - Sense of entitlement to special treatment and to obedience from others - Exploitative of others to achieve personal gain - Unwilling to empathize with the feelings, wishes, and needs of other people - Intensely envious of others, and the belief that others are equally envious of them - Pompous and arrogant demeanor
A comment like this would not raise the attention of D moderators though.
So who's the real sockpuppter, troll, narcisist, that makes all the post like these (that you'll see all over the D forums, in response to anyone that says negative things about D).
(aka.. dave?.. aka many other aliases too??)
Also it seems to have a multiple personality disorder.
Mr Bright seemingly wants it to be the next C.
Mr Andrescu seemingly wants it to be the worlds best meta template programming language.
D users are equally split (is it a better C#, a better Python, a better this, a better that??).
It does seem to be very complex, undisciplined vision for a language that aims for mainstream use.
Then you have all the problems with the lack of library support for this or that, lack of support tools for this or that ...etc etc.
If you read the forums, people spend far too much time debugging their code, due to a variety of strange things that occur in the language due to all its different personalities trying to live in the same place.
So don't be decieved - there really are plenty of disadvantages in using D (and perhaps they outweigh the advantages).
You are astroturfing HN like you were impersonating people on the D forums. Please stop.
You must be one of those D forum members that don't like other expressing opinions about D, (i.e. ones like TorUser warns us of.)
I did, not very intensively for now, but the general feeling has been good:
- I can use it from day one if I know C++, something to consider if you want to get things done
- it interoperates better than other languages with my C++ stuff
- the metaprogramming capabilities are nice and familiar to someone coming from C++
- the standard library is well prepared and the ranges, algorithms, named tuples and others are well-thought designs that have zero overhead (they use compile-time mechanisms for algorithm selection or tuple code generation)
- std.experimental.allocator: you can control memory management, though I did not use this myself and I do not know how mature it is
- there are efforts to make the language more gc-free friendly if that is what you need
- there is a switch for betterC that allows you to use a subset that is powerful yet still very light
- compile times are good
Is it complex? Well, it can get as complex as you want, but using it without being too fancy is joyful and easier than C++, definitely. I have been investigating several of these languages for a while, concretely, a bit closer Nim, Go and D.
Go is very nice at what it does, but that's it. It can be written and used in teams easily, but it is too specialized: by specialized I mean you have the GC with the channels and goroutines systems but you do not have control on memory layout or indirection or allocation AFAIK. Interoperability is also more difficult than with D.
Nim looks promising. The problem is that it looks promising, but the reality is that it is not ready for production use yet. Also, something that should look like an advantage looks like a disadvantage to me: it looks clean because it follows a Python syntax. D chose to follow C and C++. That is an advantage, no matter how clean Nim looks, because at the end, most people know C. The library ecosystem is far better in D also. Interoperability: I think Nim is easy to mix with C, but not with C++ and Objective-C. Do you really know of anyone that would adopt a language without a realistic migration path of their code bases? Maybe for hobby projects yes, but for enterprise? Because these things can get painful easily and they make for a lot of time wasted.
D: powerful and understandable metaprogramming if you come from C++ (I saw Nim's metaprogramming and I must say it also impressed me, that is true). Good migration path. More mature than Nim. General purpose, can control memory allocation. Trying to solve real world problems. The most pragmatic tool for general purpose programming if you want good performance and getting things done, something I care a lot, because at the end the language is just a tool. I do not need a perfect tool, I need something convenient that lets me finish things.
From this pack, for me, D is the only one that is a positioned candidate to be both general purpose and mature enough at this moment. Nim is not there yet, unfortunately, and interoperability and lack of maturity play against it strongly. If you add that almost anyone knows C and many people know C++, but many people will just not know Python, that is something else to consider. As for Go, it is too specialized in one area, which does very well. But it is what it is.
What gave you that idea? Nim is easier to interoperate with C++ and Objective-C than any language that I know of (including D!).
In addition I personally also consider Nim to be production ready (and know many others who do too). But I can appreciate that the pre-1.0 state makes people nervous.
As with any programming langauge, if you do simple things, and do them often, then you'll probably have little to worry about. D certainly makes many things simple for you.
On the otherhand, the language has no personality that you get your head around. It tries to be everything to everyone.
If you are presented with some code for D app, it's not possible to understand what 'style' programming you'll see, until you see it - because the language supports so many paradigms.
Although, not all paradigms are faithfully represented.
For example, class-oriented programmers will get at least an intial shock, when they realise that private class members are public witin a module. Any code in a module can change any part of your encapsulated classes.
Then, you have the issue of public being the default.
Then, you have the issue of class instances being able to share mutable data.
And the list goes on..and on... and on..
If you've never programmed before, these might not be such a big deal, but if you're an experience programmers from a mainstream langauges, you'll spend a large amount of your time working out all these things for yourself, most of the time.
I personally do not see the benefit for experienced programmers to switch from a well supported, well maintained, mainstream langauges, to D. It just does not make sense to me.
Sure D does some interesting things. Other languages can learn and take from D, just as D has taken so much from other langauges.
In the end, there is nothing in D that really changes the nature of programming. It's all the stuff we already know, all wound up into one big monstrosity, that lacks any real supporting ecosphere.
I do not get this point. I use D as a C++ improvement (which is what it was since the beginning) and I can do from functional, to OOP to structured or generic programming. No personality? You mean it does not favor any paradigm? That is another of the reasons why I chose it. By this measure, Nim is another non-personality language: the package offers the same things -> soft real-time gc, generic, structured and OOP (with Nim Style programming), metaprogramming. Should I say that Nim has no personality and conclude it is not useful? Nim is not useful due to "metaproblems" -> tools, maturity, worse interoperability than D. I do not say the language is not nice, I just say that it is more complicated to get things done with it from a perspective of someone looking for something that can work. Also, following Python makes it for very nice-looking code, but I am not sure it was the right decision from a social point of view (more people know C/C++ than know Python).
> For example, class-oriented programmers will get at least an intial shock, when they realise that private class members are public witin a module
I consider that a design mistake, but that does not preclude powerful metaprogramming or superior interoperability, which are far more important to my use case.
> Then, you have the issue of class instances being able to share mutable data.
I make primarily use of structs and all gc stuff and mutability problems disappear.
> I personally do not see the benefit for experienced programmers to switch from a well supported, well maintained, mainstream langauges, to D
The case for C++ is still very strong for me. But try to get good compile times and do something along the lines of static if (I do not mean only if constexpr in C++ with templates, try to avoid macros for config if you want and you will see, or add a conditional member to a class, or simulate something like version, or generate code without messing with macros)
> In the end, there is nothing in D that really changes the nature of programming.
That is a fair opinion, but I can say that in D there are these small nice things that I value in day-to-day programming like static if (a powerful one, not one that is in the middle between useful and full-featured), overloading opDispatch for forwarding, fast compile times and a module system. The faster compile-times are really, really something that makes more of an impact, maybe, than everything else.
I understand your point, D has nothing "revolutionary". D is not revolution, it is evolution. But D is targeted at doing and using techniques that have been useful for years (and not experimental) easier and convenient: from memory allocation control to gc-free programming, immutability or better interoperability (something that should not be underestimated when using older code bases). I really think that people that see nothing "new" in D should try and see how the full package works together. They will be surprised. And they will also be surprised at how much of the older techniques, in improved versions, they can use. Techniques that have been useful for decades, not experiments of the last FP trends or experiments for which drawbacks are not well known.
I used to think things along the lines you say. I still use C++ mainly, but, when I have another chance, I will insist on D a bit more. I think it is worth the time.
> It's all the stuff we already know, all wound up into one big monstrosity, that lacks any real supporting ecosphere.
That is precisely the strong point of it. It is evolution, not revolution. Did anyone discover lately a better general programming paradigm suddenly that makes all the other obsolete? Not AFAIK. Packaging things in familiar ways has real advantages of lowering the learning curve or figuring out more easily how to interoperate with older code bases. As I said before, that should not be underestimated if you really want to get things done and deliver stuff. If you are just toying around maybe you enjoy more something more revolutionary. But if I have to get things finished, I would bet on D rather than Nim or Go for most use cases.
Once again. Nim is superior to D in terms of interoperability with C, C++, and Objective C because Nim can compile to either of those languages. For C++ interoperability this is a huge benefit.
I'd love to hear why you disagree if you do disagree. Otherwise please give Nim a try and stop spreading this as a disadvantage of Nim.
I did not downvote anyone unless it was an accident :)
> Nim is superior to D in terms of interoperability with C, C++, and Objective C because Nim can compile to either of those languages.
I did not try myself. Well, I did not try Nim to the level I tried D, starting bc I know C++ better than D, though I also know quite a bit of Python (my "second" language).
I have a question, though, about interoperability: you can output Nim code to C++, and mix it. Fair point. But that would be useful to integrate my Nim code into C++ (C++ being the "driver" app). What about the other direction where I can consume C++ from Nim? I have no idea and I ask this question with the best of the intentions :) You thought very bad about me and the downvotes before.
I was actually talking about it from that direction, i.e. using C++ libraries in Nim. You can wrap pretty much any C++ feature in Nim: destructors, namespaces, you name it. Because Nim compiles to C++ it can interface with it incredibly well.
Happy to answer any more questions in case I'm not clear.
> You thought very bad about me and the downvotes before.
Apologies. I just saw you reiterating the line I challenged without replying to me and was wondering what happened. Was just asking, not blaming :)
> I was actually talking about it from that direction, i.e. using C++ libraries in Nim. You can wrap pretty much any C++ feature in Nim: destructors, namespaces, you name it.
Is there any documentation about how to wrap my C++ code into Nim? I do get I can generate C++ from Nim, but I am not sure how it would look to use C++ from Nim. In D for me it is quite clear (with extern (C++) and there is a clear mapping for interfaces and other things. I do not need anything spectacularly fancy, just smooth. Y' know, I am a person who likes to finish things without getting too lost on the details.
You also mentioned many people consider Nim "production-ready". My question here is, if I start to try it, how many breakages can I expect? 4-5, in the tens? Until version 1.0 I mean.
And my last question: how does it compare to D if I have to:
- use a well-mantained GUI library in at least one system (multiplatform would be a big plus)
- how mature is the standard (and other libraries also if that is easy to add) library for: json handling, binary serialization, algorithmic code (a la range-v3 or ranges in D. Something along the lines of python iterators, functools, comprehensions and itertools also ok).
- would I be able to use Nim in embedded if I do a port of some software? Namely, would I be able to remove the GC?
One thing that worries me is that I am much more familiar with metaprogramming in C++ and D's metaprogramming is much closer than Nim's I guess. If you could refer me to good (as in up-to-date) Nim style I would highly appreciate it, specially in the areas of how to manage runtime polymorphism and metaprogramming with an eye on generative programming (basically I want to generate a bunch of things from 3 or 4 basic building blocks in arbitrary combinations).
Thanks for your time!
> Apologies. I just saw you reiterating the line I challenged without replying to me and was wondering what happened. Was just asking, not blaming :)
No problem, I just did not mean to make anyone offended :)
Here is some docs: https://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html#implementation-specifi...
> My question here is, if I start to try it, how many breakages can I expect? 4-5, in the tens? Until version 1.0 I mean.
Depends which features you are using. The newer features (concepts for example) will likely have more breakages than the rest of the language. We already have a lot of code written in Nim and a book published (which we are committed to keep compatible with 1.0) so breakages should be minimal (unforeseen circumstances of course may happen).
> how does it compare to D if I have to: > > - use a well-mantained GUI library in at least one system (multiplatform would be a big plus)
I'm not sure about the status of GUI support for D. Nim has bindings to GTK/QML/libui and some other more experimental GUIs rendered using pure OpenGL (nimx). They are all cross-platform (although GTK on macOS is a PITA).
> - how mature is the standard (and other libraries also if that is easy to add) library for: json handling, binary serialization, algorithmic code (a la range-v3 or ranges in D. Something along the lines of python iterators, functools, comprehensions and itertools also ok).
JSON handling is very mature.
I don't think we have binary serialisation in the stdlib.
Algorithmic code - sequtils is what you're after I guess: http://nim-lang.org/docs/sequtils.html
> - would I be able to use Nim in embedded if I do a port of some software? Namely, would I be able to remove the GC?
Sure, but you won't be able to use a lot of the stdlib.
> One thing that worries me is that I am much more familiar with metaprogramming in C++ and D's metaprogramming
I suppose Nim by Example is a good place to look, it has some good metaprogramming examples: https://nim-by-example.github.io/
Also my book has a chapter on metaprogramming :) https://book.picheta.me/
Hope that answers your questions!
If so I would like to hear your perspective on it. What would you say to convince a Nim core dev to switch to D? :)
Pony has compile time guarantees on not having data races, dead locks, runtime exceptions. It accomplishes this in a different way than Rust. For concurrency/async, Pony is Actor based, which I find to be a joy for modeling concurrent applications.
Here's a high level: https://www.ponylang.org/discover/#what-is-pony
The breaking changes have been minimal since I've started using it. Typically just slight changes to some type signatures. The core parts (Actors, Reference Capabilities, Classes/Traits/Interfaces) are all stable at this point. I'm amazed by how well ponyc (the compiler) works. You just run it and it figures everything out.
If I could change anything in the language right now, I wouldn't mind seeing a couple of the reference capabilities renamed (trn, box, and maybe tag specifically), though I don't have any better names to offer. I'd also like if Actor Behaviour dispatch had a different syntax than Object method invoke.
> I want to write once and run on Windows / Linux / Mac. (I'm not writing a GUI.)
Portability is Nim's great strength. You can even target some really obscure platforms, as long as they have a C compiler (which they likely will).
> Concurrency and async capabilities
Concurrency in Nim is offered via async await with first-class support for Windows, Linux and macOS (IOCP, epoll and kqueue). It's implemented 100% using Nim's macros, so you can easily dive into its implementation and modify it to suit your use case without having to mess with the compiler source code. It's all implemented in the standard library.
Nim's async has also been used in production for quite some time now. One example is the Nim Forum: https://forum.nim-lang.org.
> Safety guarantees (both types and threads)
Parallelism in Nim is a little different than in other languages. Each thread has its own GC and memory sharing between threads is limited. This ensures safety and performance (no stop-the-world GC).
> Speed
Out of all the language's you've mentioned I would say that they are all pretty similar in terms of speed.
Hope this helps!
Sorry to be unfair but: is being _new_ the prime quality of a programming language?
I didn't expect that somebody else might post a link to it - it seems I might be too late for the party.
If anybody has any questions regarding Nim or suggestions how to make the tutorial better - let me know.
I know this is dangerously close to bikeshedding territory, but if I may, I wanted to point you to a similar resource that I recall being particularly pleasing to read way back when I was getting started in Python / Django:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080730140551/http://www.django...
That content has been retired from djangobook.com, and the website's design has followed suit, hence the archive.org link. I suggest also perusing the table of contents and making note of small design hints such as the use of color, whitespace, "Note" callouts, etc.
At the very least, I hope you'll find this inspirational if you decide to take a moment to rethink typography, typesetting and the overall design of the website and PDF.
Thanks for the feedback!
I would very much like to improve the looks of the website and PDF.
The current situation is this: I have zero experience with html/css, so I just took some css template and tweaked some values (lots of trial and error) until it looked okayish (There is probably some unneeded stuff in there too). And PDF is created by using the default style of asciidoc-pdf - I guess this can also be customized, but haven't looked into it yet.
Having said that, if somebody with more web-experience would like to improve my style.css [0], PRs are welcome.
[0] https://github.com/narimiran/nim-basics/blob/master/style.cs...
But while I think the content is good, I think your framing is way off. You state explicitly up front that this document is not for experienced programmers, but for novice users and people unfamiliar with programming. You go so far as to assume they're so novice that they don't know what "printing" means in terms of text to a screen. I'm going to kindly suggest that this document won't be very helpful at all for those users. To illustrate why I think so, I'm going to walk you though reading this document from a true novice perspective:
I'm reading the tutorial. I follow the installation instructions, and all of a sudden I'm installing over 500 MB worth of stuff to my machine? Many novice users may be coming from Windows, and some warning about this upfront would go over well.
As a user who you assume doesn't understand even the basics of printing to the screen, you've asked me to download and install 500 MB worth of stuff just to run the compiler, and then you suggest I may need three additional tools (well do I or don't I?as your reader, I'm here for your opinion. I don't know the merits of any of these tools). It's more helpful to be authoritative in situations like this. Leaving too many options open for a novice user leads to confusion.
But I persist, and I've downloaded your language tooling, MinGW, VSCode, assorted plugins and other things, and I don't really know what they're for. But after all of that, the payoff is to print a word to the screen. I would be a very determined reader if I continued at this point.
But the remainder of the tutorial is supposed to take us from readers who don't know programming at all, to readers who can write programs. And the way you've chosen to do so is to introduce notions of types of data, and then build on that to the point where you are doing operations on data. That is a tried and tested pedagogical tactic for presenting new syntax to experienced programmers, but the novice is left fumbling and confused about what those data types are for and how that relates to the problems they'd like to solve with this language.
You don't let the users write an honest to god program that has input and output until the very end of the tutorial.
I'm sorry if I seem overly critical, but I think this tutorial could be much much improved if you just admit what it is (a tutorial exposing Nim syntax to experienced programmers), and reframe it as such.
Thank you :)
> I can politely ask the publisher next time please do use bigger or darker fonts for code
I think it's unlikely the publisher will see your message here. You might have better luck Tweeting at them or emailing them.
In the past I already mentally classified it as a not very well defined language, with a not very well done feature set analysis. A comment in HN described it in a way that seems to fit: (...) a hodgepodge of stuff thrown together, a lack of language design with a surplus of features (from this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11960814)
It's not the only time when the language's (arguably) unnecessary breath has been critiziced: from having a suprisingly huge feature set (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13312205) to implementing everything but the kitchen (sink) and having a lack of engaged contributers, leading to many bugs, little documentation, and a very messy standard library (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13355579).
Have those comments (which admittely only represent the personal opinions of their owners) been rendered outdated by now?
I'd argue that for an absolute zero-knowledge starting point, Rust would be more valuable to start learning, given that both would have a big (or "huge") surface but very different levels of apparent polish and structural design choices behind them. But of course, it's all a matter of taste.
I’m not deep into this yet but I dig the ‘voice’ being used. It’s difficult to break ‘obvious’ things down to those without background while staying concise.
Thank you very much! It means a lot to see this kind of feedback.
> It’s difficult to break ‘obvious’ things down to those without background while staying concise.
After writing this tutorial, I can only nod and agree with this statement - it took me much more time than I originally thought it would.
P.S. Thank you for the kind words about Nim in Action!
1 - https://forum.nim-lang.org/
That being said, this is a very well written tutorial. Might be a nice format to use in other basic language tutorials.
As for style insensitivity: it allows you to keep your code base consistent. Ever had to use a library that used snake_case in your own camelCase codebase? Well, with Nim you can just use camelCase everywhere.
Is that really desirable? I posit that if you have a codebase that breaks if fooBar and foobar refer to the same variable, it's already broken!
This is not criticism; I prefer Nim's mostly-case-and-underscore-insensitive approach, but I think this is a pitfall that should be acknowledged and taken into account (which is quite easy to do given the included nimgrep).
Perhaps it makes sense to have an optional warning in case a name is inconsistently spelled inside the same compilation unit.
There are already formatter tools that check for that.
Also, any editor with completion will suggest the right form every time preventing the bug.
Most languages seem to have a convention that all practitioners follow, which is ideal I think, but this might be second best.
Author of the tutorial here. Thank you very much for your kind words!
> Significant whitespace and case- and underscore insensitivity. That's pushing too many of my buttons for one language.
Coming from Python, I had no problem with the significant whitespace. I like it more than curly braces everywhere.
Case- and underscore- insensitivity were something I initially really didn't like. What were they thinking? Are they out of their minds?
After using Nim for a year, I must say I didn't experience any problem with it so far. All the code I have written, all the code from others I have read uses camelCase (which is a recommended, but not enforced, case). So basically, even though people have an option to use snake_case (or any other), the large majority of users use only the one style.
This is a great feature when interfacing directly with C libraries. You can declare the names as they are in the original library, which is best for debugging and reference. They can be a variety of styles, but in your code you can refer to them all with camelCase so you have a consistent style in your own code.
I've never had any problem with it. It just works, and if you don't want to use it, it's not going to be an issue.
Nim: https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/1779
D: https://forum.dlang.org/thread/mailman.1427.1428691340.3111....
And the following is probably one of the most extensive comparisons of the two languages: https://github.com/timotheecour/D_vs_nim/
I wouldn't say Nim is "radical", but it is interesting in that it combines ideas in a way that I've not seen in other languages. Whether or not it really takes off, it's a good thing that it's around - if nothing else, it's a slightly easier way for devs who work primarily in higher-level languages like Python and Ruby to encounter concepts they might not otherwise encounter, like macros and a complex type system.
Few projects: nbuild[1], ntangle[2].
I wouldn't say that these are exemplary projects.. but they just show that Nim can replace bash/Python for command line utilities.
[1]: https://github.com/kaushalmodi/nbuild/ [2]: https://github.com/kaushalmodi/ntangle/
If performance isn't a big deal, the other thing I've noticed is that compilation guarantees a much higher quality of code compared to interpretation. At least compared to Python, I have been hit by bad code which didn't get caught because there was no test for it. I've not faced that with Nim yet.
No doubt you can still have issues but it's one less thing to worry about.
I liked playing with Nim in spare time. But, I don't think I'll use it for anything I care about to maintain for a long time.
If you do want the new cooler features, then ya, you may need to port your code but that's the case with any compiler update - you need to run a full regression at the very least.
If that's not what the developers are trying to communicate with a pre-1.0 version I do wonder what they're gating 1.0 on. What needs finalization? Documentation?
Probably a bigger factor is that Nim doesn't have a well-known organisation such as Google/Mozilla behind it.
This is not strictly true, in languages with type inference (which are becoming increasingly common)
From the tutorial:
> Nim also has type inference ability — the compiler can automatically detect the type of a name assignment from its value, without explicitly stating the type.
Static typing with type inference is still static typing.
Vaguely related: many people also confuse 'dynamically typed' and 'untyped', despite that they're not even close.
> People with minimal previous programming experience
> People with some programming experience in other programming languages
Both mean the same.