Nimrod is being renamed to Nim | Hacker News Reader

Nimrod is being renamed to Nim

github.com

79 pointsbilalhusain62 comments

Honestly, smart move. I'm kind of embarrassed to say that I decided not to look into nimrod much, despite hearing great things about it from a few people, all because of the name. Figured that it would never gain any semblance of wide adoption under "nimrod" so why bother when there are other languages that are just as cool and may be a marketable skill someday? Or maybe I'm just rationalizing my shallow knee jerk reaction after the fact.

Either way... nim sounds much better :)

Technically, `nimrod` means someone who is a good hunter; I don't know why it is viewed as a derogatory term.

You can blame Bugs Bunny. He was using it sarcastically when referring to Elmer Fudd (one of the more inept hunters in the history of film). Viewers who didn't understand the original reference began to think of it as just another word for 'moron'.

Second post in the thread that cites "Bugs Bunny". If that is now canon and required reading for educated people I have some work to do!

They got it from Wikipedia, which also cites Bugs Bunny as the source of "nimrod"'s modern meaning.

I had only encountered the term while watching the carton, which all my friend did too. I didn't learn about the word's origin until much later.

Words mean what people think they mean, so nimrod means a "stupid person" to far more people than "good hunter". Also, keep in mind that the meaning you're arguing against has been around so long that it's also in the dictionary.

Wow, why? Is it offensive somehow?

It's a slang term for "idiot" in American English.

And that's what people find offensive these day? Interesting.

I don't think its a matter of "offensive" so much as "carries negative associations", which both has first order effects (makes some people less likely to use it because it is less attractive on an sub-rational level) and second order effects (makes some people less likely to use it because they perceive that it is less likely to be a long term success because other people are likely to find it less attractive on a sub-rational level).

Not all negative associations are about a term being "offensive".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimrod#Idiom

"In 15th-century English, "Nimrod" had come to mean tyrant"

"In 20th-century American English, the term is now commonly used to mean a dimwitted or a stupid person."

I could see how you wouldn't want your programming language to be considered a tyrant or a dimwit.

Or a dimwitted tyrant. ;-)

Nimrod was the great grandson of Noah, and he is mentioned in the book of Genesis as "a mighty hunter before the lord." So great hunters were sometimes called "Nimrod" as a compliment.

Bugs Bunny taunted Elmer Fudd, a stupid an incompetent hunter that failed to catch Bugs Bunny, by calling him a Nimrod. But the children who watched Loony Tunes didn't get the joke and so they assumed it was a synonym for "stupid and incompetent."

Imagine that in the future people think that that "Einstein" means "imbecile" because "you're a regular Einstein" was an ironic taunt. It's the same idea.

"Dunce" comes from the name of the philosopher Duns Scotus.

Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quando_el_Rey_Nimrod

Well, except that Einstein was an actual person, and Nimrod was a mythological one.

Hardly an important distinction for these intents and purposes; particularly since those stories were widely taught as fact until fairly recently.

And you know that how? Yeah, you don't. It isn't even relevant to this conversation.

Having a pejorative reference to an unpleasant person didn't hurt git. Here, Araq has taken an association that is generally viewed as slightly humorous and moved to a name with which no one has any associations, either good or bad.

In tech marketing, taking a brand that's been invested in and renaming it for no good reason is something you should be loath to do, as it throws away the value and associations that exist with the current brand.

Among the typical "good reasons" for changing the name in are: 1) the brand has been diminished by some bad news / negagive attention and so they're rebranding; 2) the brand causes confusion with other products; 3) legal reasons; 4) some other well-defined limitation that makes growth impossible.

Without having any more insight into the reasons behind this, it's hard to see whether this is a good move or the beginning of a decline for Nimrod as a concept.

> Here, Araq has taken an association that is generally viewed as slightly humorous and moved to a name with which no one has any associations, either good or bad.

That's not true; every mathematician knows the game of Nim: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim (_asummers points this out below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8352021). I agree that it's a pretty neutral association, but, then again, did the name 'Nimrod' ever really have anything to do with the language? (I don't know.)

Nimrod was a character in the story of the tower of babel, which explains the diversity of languages in the old testament. Hence its relation to programming languages.

Ah, no. Nimrod had nothing to do with Babel.

OK, maybe not, but according to wikipedia's page on him:

> Extra-biblical traditions associating him with the Tower of Babel led to his reputation as a king who was rebellious against God.

On the other hand, the most popular version control software is called "git".

Yes, not to mention, when was the last time you heard someone call somebody else a nimrod? The 1940s?

It can't hurt and Nim is a short and memorable name. Realistically it will probably have very little impact (and the core devs likely know this). Whether Nim gains widespread adoption has a lot more to do with whether it can compete successfully with Rust, C++, or whatever is remotely similar to it. D, for example, has a really good name (the successor to C), but hasn't become heavily used in industry despite what advantages it does have and years of development.

> Yes, not to mention, when was the last time you heard someone call somebody else a nimrod? 1890s England?

I hear it all the time. Probably nearly daily. It depends on your circles, I suppose.

I apologize for making such a broad statement.

What portion of the US do you live in?

Why do you assume RogerL lives in the US? (RogerL probably does, but what makes you think so?)

As others have said, nimrod-as-an-insult seems to be a thing mostly in the US.

Nim should follow the tooling around Go and just steal all of the good parts. I think Nim's main competitor is Julia. I'd focus on weaving Nim and RoboVM code together so one could leverage all the libs from Java/JVM while getting native performance.

You also probably do not want a version control system that is "liable to unpredictable changes".

Also, the British have named a bunch of ships "Nimrod" in centuries past. I think the name has a bit of dignity because of that.

IIRC we Brits also have/had some sort of reconaissance aircraft by that name too.

Also, wasn't there a living-metal future-sentinel type thing in the X-Men stories that was called Nimrod and was pretty terrifying?

It's interesting to consider this in light of the opening quote on the language's homepage (which still refers to it as Nimrod):

  The most important thing in the programming language is the   
  name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I 
  have recently invented a very good name and now I am 
  looking for a suitable language. 
  -- D. E. Knuth

http://nim-lang.org/

And yet loads of us use "git" without an issue.

Just guessing, but I would say that's because "git" is only derogatory in British English, and wasn't popular (if even existent) in American English until it's use as the name of a DVCS.

I like to think, humorously, that the name of the DVCS came about from the BitKeeper mess that ultimately led to the creation of git:

* Andrew Tridgell is a git for reverse-engineering BitKeeper

* Larry McVoy is a git for throwing a tantrum and withdrawing free BitKeeper

* Linus is a git for blaming Trigdell as the cause of Larry's reaction

Personally I think they're all gits.

I always thought that git was a form of got or get.

Get me the source code. I got the source code.

Git is almost like a slang word that means get or got.

Yeah in British English it means a stupid person, you useless git! Almost like Nimrod means stupid dimwitted person.

> Git is almost like a slang word that means get or got.

Perhaps more dialect than slang?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_Along,_Little_Dogies

That makes sense. However if you look at Linus' description of git, a "stupid content tracker", then the British English derogatory term makes sense.

I agree. While I'm training people on git at work (in Seattle), they often look up the term and point out the definition to me. I then direct them to Linus' intention, for it to be "a stupid content tracker".

"wasn't popular (if even existent) in American English until it's use as the name of a DVCS."

... and the quoting of Monty Python

Linus could have named it basically anything. He didn't have much of an uphill battle to get people to pay attention to his project due to its attachment to an existing superstar codebase.

Nimrod was a King of Babylon, he was considered a hunter of panthers.

The Greek Orion was supposed to be based on him and shares the same star consolation. So was Osirus. His birthday was December 25th.

It was Arabic that gave the definition of a tyrant, as I suppose they saw him as one.

Bungs Bunny called Elmer Fudd a 'Nimrod' in a cartoon that made the connection of hunter to really dimwitted or stupid person. I guess that is where the second definition came in.

Always research the words you use to describe your project, there may be negative meanings to them. Even in a foreign language as well. Chevy Nova, in Spanish it meant the car doesn't run.

I can only see this helping them... even by a little. Never understood the naming strategies of some folks.

The derogatory meaning of the word is US-specific. To the rest of the world, Nimrod is simply the mythical character. Nimrod's author is German. It's not surprising that he wasn't aware of the American slang usage.

Is Nimrod mentioned in any historical texts outside of the Bible? It seems like Bible trivia that very few people would know, perhaps especially outside of the US.

He was kind of a big deal in the Old Testament as a Baddie and Wikipedia says his story was well-known, especially in Islam and Judaism.

> The story of Abraham's confrontation with Nimrod did not remain within the confines of learned writings and religious treatises, but also conspicuously influenced popular culture.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimrod#The_evil_Nimrod_vs._the_...

In Britain, "Nimrod" may be best known as the title of a very popular piece of orchestral music (from Elgar's Enigma Variations).

Glad to see it. Sure, names don't really mean all that much in the final run; influential brands tend to cancel out pre-existing negative connotations (see: Git). But for nascent projects like Nim, a name with pre-existing connotations can be a burden, and a cool name can give a useful boost.

Of course, what I think when I see Nim now is The Secret of NIMH: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084649/reference.

In some important ways (clean code, performance, metaprogramming) the engineering is way ahead of the competition. I'm actually amazed how quickly this has gone from a little-known project to something that leading engineers are putting in their tool belt as an alternative to Python, C++ and other languages for a wide variety of tasks.

The name change really only seems to be present in the repository description for now. Virtually everything else has been left unscathed.

I think it's a shame, personally. The name "Nimrod" is just so distinctive and it's going to be pretty hard (at least for me) to shake off the inertia.

So, is he going to change the logo to a rat?(after the children's book Rats of NIMH) Seriously though the name was good for a chuckle but made the language slightly more memorable. Mostly I tend to think of the British spy plane when I hear the name, not the insult.

People will get confused when people Google it and find the poset game Nim[1]. Unless of course that's what they were going for.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim

If the programming language has any web presence at all, it will quickly bury the game. Also, it's not like people are going to overhear the word "nim" completely out of context and then google it. If you know it's a programming language, it will be easy to find resources.

Given the long mathematical heritage of the game (check out its Google presence: https://www.google.com/search?q=Nim), I'm not sure that I believe that it'll be so easily upset. On the other hand, the first page of results for https://www.google.com/search?q=Ruby (except the image results) are all about the language, not the gem, so I could be wrong!

I guess Go is doing well enough sharing a name with an ancient board game, and the two languages are occasionally compared, so it's a bit fitting that way.

When googling for go language related things, you may have a hard time, unless you know to use golang instead of go depending on context.

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

https://www.google.com/search?q=golang+strategy&oq=golang+st...

Actually it has never been a case for me. When searching for Go i have never had a problem finding whatever i was looking for.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=go

https://www.google.com/search?q=go

It's less of an issue now than it was a few years ago. But again context is key.

Try "go observer" vs "golang observer".

If your go app is having issues with a firewall you might search "go firewall" which seems less relevant than "golang firewall."

If you wanted a library that handles "rules" "golang rules library" provides better result than "go rules library."

If you know what you're looking for "go" is probably a sufficient search term. If you don't know what you're looking for (and you're not just using google as a bookmark site) "golang" seems to be a better search term.

why?

I can't find any official statements about this renaming (there's a BigBreak branch which is supposed to take care of renaming as per a thread reply on the forum[1]) but I assume that people have been citing the name as a barrier to a widespread adoption of Nimrod [2][3].

[1] http://forum.nimrod-lang.org/t/541

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7076451

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7074774

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