I like Nim a lot. And I know that it'll scratch a necessary itch if I'm working with scientists. I also know that it's too much to ask that the scientists just buckle down and learn Rust or something like that.
But as someone who is not afraid of Rust but is learning Nim because of its applicability to the crowd that I want to help... The vibrancy of the Rust community is really tempting me away from this plan.
I've really enjoyed the Nim community also. I even contributed some code into the standard library (a first) and was surprised at how easy they made it.
But I have also written issues against Nim libraries which have gone unanswered for months. Meanwhile, certain rust projects (helix, wezterm, nushell) just have a momentum that only Nim itself can match.
Python benefitted from there being no nearby neighbors which resembled it (so far as I'm aware). If you needed something like python, you needed python.
Rust and Go and Zig are not for scientists, but they're getting developer attention that Nim would get if they didn't exist. Also, Julia is there to absorb some of the scientist attention. It's a Tower of Babel problem.
I can't say why the scientists aren't flocking to Nim, but as someone who wants to support them wherever they go, this is why I'm uncertain if Nim is the right call. But when I stop and think about it, I can't see a better call either.