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Comment by treeform | Hacker News Reader

My vote is on Nim. Python like syntax with C++ speed. Unknown enough, but still not too new or obscure.

The community gives me pause. Nim's BDFL seems to have a habit of driving away prominent users of the language. Programmers who had contributed to the compiler have made their own hostile fork, and two of the three people who have written book-length introductions to the language have either given up on Nim or been tempted to do so. (The third is the BDFL himself.)

If anyone cares, here's some comments from one of those authors: https://github.com/StefanSalewski/NimProgrammingBook/issues/... . And from the other: https://twitter.com/d0m96/status/1592827547582332929?t=IqKBz... .

These quarrels with Araq differ obviously, but both are pretty discouraging as far as Nim's prospects are concerned.

Interesting. I saw shades of this when I tried porting a tool over to Nim, found it was much slower than trivial code in Python and Groovy, then stumbled into this discussion:

https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/issues/9026

Nothing as strong as the above but it definitely rubbed me the wrong way. So much advertising about Nim being efficient/fast and the default way to read a file is incredibly slow and inefficient .... and they don't care.

That issue is about readLine specifically right? Not reading a file in general. The only time I get to ever use readLine is to solve adventofcode problems.

That's really petty argument against nim and it makes me sad really. 'Hostile' fork isn't true, just a fork. I wish you the best.

Most language fail to gain traction for reasons that don't have anything to do with the design of the language itself--even "petty" ones, such as the tactlessness of the people in charge. I don't want to use a technology which few other people use and which has, in my estimation, an unpromising future.

Asserting that the English language can't evolve is a weird take from someone who is trying to evolve a programming language.

My vote is for Nim too, but I'm decidedly biased. It's allowed us to do things in embedded that would've taken 3, 4 times as long and with more developers to achieve in C++.

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