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13716 :: A Newbie's Questions - before Picking up Nim

• artistlibre (orginal) [2026-02-12T19:31:20+01:00] view original

  Hi, all!

  I am an animator (also, a non-programmer), who's been thinking (say, for 4+ years) about learning at-least any one programming language in my life, and that must be easier for my mind (note: I know pretty much every context around computing, except for programming), to experiment some logic and batch process tools I may need in my pipeline.

  I look at Nim - a static typed language - as a new-to-programming person.

  Python or Lua, or even GodotScript were initial choices (still, are to some degree); even if they exist in the plugin API - in some of the tools I use. But, I don't wanna restrict my thinking around only the high-level aspects. As my processes involve videos and graphics, and if I want to speak something to my machine 10 years later in my life, I'm not sure how I can touch "C" so that I can speed up Python or Lua (meaning no disrespect to these).

  I want it to be something I could do - on the flow, without hurting my usual animation routine. Yet, I want "the language I choose"- to be something versatile (looking at C, C++ and JS backends) and yet, purposefully minimalistic (excited at the posts about Nimony's progress).

  So, before I make my choice, I have two questions:

  1. If LLMs can easily understand Nim (as I read in recent Nimony progress article), how does it impact a person’s reason to try and take up programming - for the long term? If AI can do (and assuming it would evolve better in 20 years), would “prompt and use the code” work better, or the original way of “think and code”?
  2. I like the libraries for Nim – like Pixie (and almost all the efforts by Treeform), (the recent) FigDraw, and a few others (incl. the raylib example I saw in the Nimony progress post). Let’s say there are some older libraries written for 1.6+ version of Nim. If I learn Nim 3.0, would it doesn’t mind the library’s Nim version I’m going to use (guessing the underlying NIF architecture would handle that)?

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  Thanks in advance!

  (And, thanks for keeping up the “minimalism” in code, while reinventing the wheels by actual thinking, as I read from whichever updates Nim brings to the table)

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• Araq (orginal) [2026-02-12T20:11:00+01:00] view original

  Hello and welcome.

  1. At this point I would treat learning programming like learning chess: Yes the machine can do it better, but you do it for your intellectual stimulation. You can also use AI to learn more quickly as it can give explanations to you and never gets tired explaining to you the same concepts in different words.
  2. The minimal Nim 3 guarantee is: You can always write libraries that work with both Nim 2 and 3. I expect many libraries will support both versions, some will not be updated but then there is AI to fork&update... But version 3 is far anyway, don't worry about it.
  3. NimScript is the same statically typed Nim. It's the same language but running under an interpreter so it's more limited.
  4. With a custom seq-like type, yes, no problem.

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