nimforum mirror - Results of our community survey

dom96 (orginal) [2016-09-04T00:36:18+02:00] view original

Thanks to everyone that filled out the survey.

I spent some time (a lot more than I'd like to admit) writing this blog article analysing the results: http://nim-lang.org/news/2016_09_03_nim_community_survey_results.html

Let me know what you think!

chemist69 (orginal) [2016-09-04T18:44:31+02:00] view original

@dom96, thank you very much for the effort you put into this survey and the evaluation of the results, which I think are very promising for the future of Nim and its community.

Arrrrrrrrr (orginal) [2016-09-04T18:48:34+02:00] view original

I'm surprised there are more people familiarized with Python than with C.

chemist69 (orginal) [2016-09-04T20:51:35+02:00] view original

@Arrrrrrrrr, this does not surprise me too much, it is definitely also true for me. It shows how well Nim is set up for programmers like me to transition from an interpreted to a compiled language.

In addition to Python, I have always wanted to learn at least one compiled language. In the recent years I have taken several attempts at learning C, C++, Java, Go, Rust and D (only one of those at each time ;-) ) and have not come very far in any of those.

I found that getting productive is easiest for me in Nim and the python-like syntax (which I find overrated, really) is only partly responsible for that. A really good example for this productivity is, I think, the difference between Java and Nim for the read-a-file-line-by-line task on rosettacode. I am also able to produce Windows binaries from my Linux machine, which is awesome. Also, in my experience, the community is very approachable and responsive. Of course, all this is completely subjective.

jlp765 (orginal) [2016-09-04T23:10:09+02:00] view original

I'm surprised there are more people familiarized with Python than with C.

I took that to mean that people who are more familiar with Python found Nim (similar language style/speed/??),

as opposed to people who were more familiar with C (they weren't looking for speed/faster development/??)

Incidently, I found nim because I was looking for something like Python but faster - obviously biasing my response :-)

v3ss0n (orginal) [2016-09-05T20:14:44+02:00] view original

It seems that after the survey , you guys are going to focus on:

Standard Library

Documentation

Stability

In this order?

I would suggest to not developing full IDE (Aproia ) but focusing on Sublime and Atom addons.

didlybom (orginal) [2016-09-06T09:28:01+02:00] view original

I agree that for the IDE it would be best to focus on using an existing extensible editor than on making a new one from scratch. However it will be hard to get people to agree on which editors to base that work on. Personally I wouldn't focus on a closed source editor (such as Sublime) when Atom and VSCode offer a similar feature set and are open source.

Krux02 (orginal) [2016-09-06T14:15:27+02:00] view original

Regarding Aporia. I really like Aporia as a starting point to test Nim for the first time. I like it because of it's simplicity to get started with Nim. There is no need to create a project, the first thing you can do is write a line of code and run it. But I would not try to sell it as an IDE. I would maybe call it a Sketchbook or something that relates to what it is, a frictionless testing ground. In my opinion it is very similar to what PDE is for the Processing community. But then I would encourage people to use something that might turn out to be a more productive experience in the long run as soon as the Projects become bigger than just testing out a few features of the language. I know this is by far not the best solution, because making people use one Editor first and then make them switch the editor later will create friction and people will not like it. But I think it is better to let them feel this friction later than before they even got started writing the first line of code. Don't try to make Aporia in the greatest editor in the world, the community of Nim is small and simply can't compete with editors that have been developed for productivity for decades (yet). Focus on one editor, make that experience great and write documentation that might lower the entrance barrier. I would also also like to see all information about editor support bundled at on location like it is done for scala here: http://ensime.github.io/editors/

Araq (orginal) [2016-09-10T09:43:39+02:00] view original

I don't know why it keeps coming up, but Aporia doesn't take away development resources, it does what it does and it does it well. However, I completely agree with this statement

But I would not try to sell it as an IDE. I would maybe call it a Sketchbook or something that relates to what it is, a frictionless testing ground.

"Better editor" support for us means nimsuggest improvements, so that every editor with a nimsuggest plugin benefits. Nimsuggest recently got a testing framework so finally we can develop it without fear of breaking things. :-)

yuutayamada (orginal) [2016-09-10T11:29:12+02:00] view original

+1 for nimsuggest's improvement and actually I puzzled people complain about lack of IDE support because there are already many editors or IDEs support for Nim: https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/wiki/editor-support

Back to nim survey, I wondered the opinion about "prefer functional paradigm" that no nim users answered. should we ask more dedicated questions about fp if we have second survey? since nim already support some functional programming futures. (i.e, ->, =>, lc[] macro of future package, apply procedure, or vegansk's nimfp library, or noSideEffect pragma) or maybe just lack of advertisement? (I'm not so sure about functional programming, so please correct me if I'm wrong)

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