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Comment by hahainternet | Hacker News Reader

I find it disturbing that languages are now adopting promotion strategies because not enough people are using them.

For fuck's sake, focus on improving the language and this will come organically. This isn't a competition as to who has the most popular language, and the most popular languages are always going to be total shit.

Just write good code, marketing departments are the bane of the entire IT sphere, you shouldn't be trying to create one for a niche language.

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> focus on improving the language and this will come organically

Or not. There are dozens of languages which are good, a couple of decades old, and only known and used by a very small community. They all followed your advice and in effect they "lost" man-centuries of contributions to other languages.

I don't know how well this is going to play out for Nim, but for a project which can't even have its own Wiki page because of how unpopular it is it may well be a good thing.

>For fuck's sake, focus on improving the language and this will come organically.

I don't have statistics to back it up but I would wager that waiting for users to come organically is among the top reasons software projects of any kind fail. Why should programming languages be special in this way?

For better or worse human beings are creatures who like to categorise things. This is how we deal with complexity, even if the categories are not always optimally chosen. Marketing departments inevitably start off with pushing a category for a product and suggesting this is it's "best at" or indeed "only option" angle. This allows we category seeking beings to remember it better, and indeed, provides a secure "beachhead", even if very specific, which the product (~language) can dominate and from which it can credibly grow. Nim does not seem to have this beachhead, and basically is therefore diluted across categories and is harder to remember. I therefore agree with the original post that Nim does not have unique selling point if you will.

Separately, "marketing" is of course a term loaded with negatives, but it is essentially about communicating a benefit in a very crowded and competitive environment. That benefit has to be very clearly enunciated and pushed, and if it is a clear and simple message, then it will be effective.

It's a secondary concern that a language is a polyglot at all sorts of use cases, is good at everything. It first has to have users. Users have lots of choice so you're best off giving a small subset of them the idea that this is the perfect tool for their specific use case, and grow from there, than telling everyone this is good at everything, even if that is true.

Unfortunately the best all rounder is often forgotten if she/he's not number one at something.

TL;DR: In a crowded and complex marketplace marketing's segmentation methods are unfortunately needed.

That's not true. Being the first few people means that the tools are not developed, common questions aren't answered, books aren't written, getting help is difficult, etc.

There are only 18 questions on StackOverFlow, for example:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/nim

People don't want to burn too many cycles discovering how the language works.

The fact that there are only 18 questions on StackOverflow could also mean that the language is that good that rarely you find something requiring further explanation. Or maybe Nim users use the Nim forum instead for questions (http://forum.nim-lang.org), where finding a C forum or Python forum is not that easy/direct.

Most of these suggestions are about how to make Nim more immediately useful to people, e.g. by being more focussed, making sure important libraries are well-optimised, etc.

I think it's really good that they're asking, "why aren't more people using our language?". That seems like a great step towards improving it.

That's absolutely a laudable goal, it's simply the idea of a marketing department for a language that I find frustrating.

As reasonable as that is, "if you build it, they will come", is a myth. Say you have an excellent product, and I would absolutely say Nim is excellent. With priority #1 out of the way, you have to speak up for yourself.

This is akin to saying a startup should thrive only on its merits alone and not use any marketing. Not going to work.

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