Nimrod looks a very powerful programming language and compiler but it doesn't seem to have much of a following yet. I think part of the problem may be the lack of good documentation or demos.
For example the httpserver demo that is included with the Nimrod download doesn't seem to use the httpserver module, the SDL demo doesn't include an event loop and many of the demos do not contain any comments at all.
I know there is a couple of tutorials that cover the fundamentals but imo it's quite a jump from them to doing anything useful.
Perhaps if the website contained a tips and tricks section where users could post their own snippets (or even their own tutorials) in order to help beginners get up and running that would help grow Nimrod's community.
"Hey, I'm reading through the tutorial at http://nimrod-code.org/tut1.html and reached the sequence type. Looks nice, like a vector in C++/Java. You can create them, but, how can you modify one? There's no information on how to append stuff to it or concatenate two sequences together? Also, what would happen if I declare one with let then try to add elements? Is the sequence itself immutable, or their contents?"
...hours pass...
"Aha, so finally I figured out to go to http://nimrod-code.org/theindex.html and search for add. Looked into the system module (http://nimrod-code.org/system.html#378) and near that I found you can add two sequences, but it wasn't so obvious because I had to rummage through the tutorial until the second part to discover the sugar syntax for object orientation and could translate the proc prototypes mentally to something.add(otherthing) to which I'm more used to given by background."
So maybe it would be good idea to tell about this on the first part of the tutorial. Or maybe it would be better if all these basic types, which are pillar blocks of the language, had a separate chapter explaining all possible operations with them. As usual the problem is that such things can only be seen with newcomer eyes.
True story.
It's certainly hard now to put yourself in the shoes of a newcomer, at least for me.
The tutorial is indeed missing quite a bit of information, and it is not best suited for beginners. I think that perhaps a tryhaskell-type site would be a lot more useful to beginners, the problem is it requires a REPL which we do not currently have, although perhaps Nimrod's interactive mode is up to the task -- but IMO, it simply does not cut it.
As you mentioned @gradha on IRC; we should definitely look at other language tutorials and gather inspiration from them. But who has the time? :P