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Comment by def- | Hacker News Reader

Python has a huge ecosystem of great libraries and is stable right now, no "once" required. In Python you can also write performance critical code in C as the standard library often does.

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Huge ecosystem also have issues. Your are tempted to use a library when a simple 100 line "replacement" that just does what you want will do.

I think the biggest problem in programming we have right now is people using libraries upon libraries not knowing how they work and drowning in complexity.

Huge ecosystems are almost like bureaucracies that eat productivity in their wake. They fool you into thinking they add value when instead they take it away.

> In Python you can also write performance critical code in C as the standard library often does.

As a sloth I can become a horse to run fast.

I like Python, but let's not take an obvious weakness and try to present it as a strength. In the modern programming language landscape where you can get expressive and fast, Python is still slow.

Does Nim have some sort of interop that lets it call into Python packages, so it can take advantage of that huge ecosystem?

I don’t get how anybody is claiming that Nim is at all comparable to Python. A nice syntax is like.... 1/10th the battle when you’re writing big projects.

There is https://github.com/yglukhov/nimpy There are/were others too IIRC.

You embed Python in Nim or build Nim as a Python extension.

I actually think it is a strength or really being able to use Cython to compile Python into C/C++ is the strength. There aren't too many scripting languages where I can do very little work/setup to get C-like performance, and I can still use Python and its huge ecosystem. Nim looks interesting because it provides a simple, concise scripting language like Python but makes compiling to C/C++ dead simple. Nim is just missing that ecosystem.

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