Hi
"Btw please join IRC or gitter instead of flooding this forum with newbie questions, no offense."
I do not want to flood your forum, but I do realize my questions would be newbie as well. The problem is, if I use irc-like I have chance to get answer only from people who are already online/reading, then it is buried, while on forum it stays as separate thread. So for others possible newbie (I know there are not many newbie here, but for future?) it is easier to discover later. Maybe finding separate part of forum or something similar would be nice idea? Having said that, I am moving to gitter.
Edit: It seems I will not join gitter. It seems it allows signing in with Github or Twitter account and, you would not believe, I have neither (and not even Facebook). I am that weird... ;)
Regards
Michal
var is passing-by-reference.
Having return value and/or arguments passing is different issue I think.
+1 @flyx
+1 Michal.
The success of 'Nim' is the success of all of us who are interested in the learning and contributing to the language and the community !
I think that noobs (like myself) should be encouraged to avoid annoying the DevGods on VCS / SCM / issue tracking tools (ex. GitHub) with anything short of a fully-baked well-thought-out bug report; but message forums are a lower tier of seriousness, about on par with chat, where novices and noobs can help each-other.
Chat logs have a lower search result helpfulness value, so telling people to only ask noob questions in chat will result in more repetitive noob questions overall.
I still think this forum needs more features, especially for categorizing threads. The poster or a moderator would tag a thread as a "n00b question", and people who don't like those could filter them out from their default thread listing.
Well there's a nim tag on StackOverflow.
Relying on Big Dot-Com sites too much is a very bad idea. I've had horrible experiences with Facebook: censorship, deception, deliberately crippled APIs, posts disappearing down the memory hole for no reason and with no explanation, etc. GitHub and StackOverflow may be less evil, but centralization is bad for Internet freedom. All Big Dot-Coms are subservient to governments (and some governments around the world are more evil than others).
I do see the benefits of using Big Dot-Coms "because everyone else is doing it", meaning through them you can reach a lot more people (that's why I've tolerated Facebook as long as I did), but ultimately it isn't worth it. Intelligent people are capable of finding you outside those Big Dot-Coms.
Perhaps there's some middle ground through syndication and synchronization, like having this forum import Nim-related conversations from GitHub and StackOverflow as read-only threads, but I am skeptical...
Both the D Forum and the Discourse based Julia forums have learner sections.
I think the IRCs are not the right medium for newbie questions, as @mmierza explains, just like the forum is not the right medium for a bug report. The Nim community leans heavily on the IRC though, which is a pity. I'd rather have a better forum, with subgroups and message threading, and ...
> Well there's a nim tag on StackOverflow.
Relying on Big Dot-Com sites too much is a very bad idea. I've had horrible experiences with Facebook
StackOverflow is nothing at all like Facebook. Relating them this way is absurd.
censorship, deception, deliberately crippled APIs, posts disappearing down the memory hole for no reason and with no explanation, etc.
None of these things happen at StackOverflow.
GitHub and StackOverflow may be less evil
StackOverflow isn't evil at all.
but centralization is bad for Internet freedom. All Big Dot-Coms are subservient to governments (and some governments around the world are more evil than others).
The centralization of StackOverflow is good for getting answers to programming questions, which is what it's for. It's not subservient to any government.
You really should consider not injecting your cockamamie political ideology into this forum.
StackOverflow is nothing at all like Facebook. Relating them this way is absurd.
There are similarities and differences. StackOverlow (Alexa rank 43) is a part of Stack Exchange Inc (a for-profit corporation which operates several other commercial sites). Stack* and Facebook are both very big, and both make money through tracking and ads. The major difference is the target audience and content structure.
Stack* is already heavily criticized for having a very rigid moderation / censorship system.
StackOverflow isn't evil at all.
I was using the colloquial relative term "lesser evil".
I am not against for-profit corporations, but it is in the user's self-interest to weigh the benefits and drawbacks compared to self-hosting an open and decentralized alternative.
It's not subservient to any government.
Everyone is entangled with and subservient to government - it's just a matter of degree...
Facebook has been banned by the gov't of China - the world's largest and increasingly dominant economy - something I'm sure its shareholders are pretty unhappy about. StackExchange is not banned in China *yet*, but it could be as many technologies (ex. Bitcoin, BitTorrent, BitMessage, IPFS, Tor, etc) pose an inherent danger to government power. It is thus in their business interest to censor anything that could get them banned, to share data with governments, etc.
This concern is directly related to Nim. If its community is subject to a chilling effect when dealing with libraries, projects, and technologies that Powers That Be don't like, then Nim is at a disadvantage.
The centralization of StackOverflow is good for getting answers to programming questions, which is what it's for.
If Stack* offers some special advantages I've failed to consider, then this is the argument you should focus on to keep this discussion constructive.
I think that people who are smart enough to use Nim should also be smart enough to go to the appropriate Web-site. Does this forum offer too steep a learning curve? Then perhaps it should be made better rather than partially replaced by a proprietary site.
This forum can integrate with lots of third party sites (ex. via OpenID) without becoming dependent on them. The bridge between Gitter and IRC with an open log bot is a great example of this.
You really should consider not injecting your cockamamie political ideology into this forum.
Reminder of context:
I was not off-topic. This thread got pivoted to discussion of preferred communication methods by Araq himself before I got here.
Oh yeah and I regretted this remark... It's fine to ask newbie questions here, the forum will get a section for this.
Now consider this thread locked (the forum will soon support this feature too) as this discussion is turning into a pointless fight.
