Hi,everybody! I'm a new guy here from China and sorry for not good at English.
I love this awesome language very much, and i think i need to do something for our community, example to maintaining a Chinese Nim Forum and a Chinese Nim Official Website .
These are my reasons:
Here're some ideas myself,I'm not sure if they're viable and what need i do ,so i come here to public this thread.
Thanks for any help!
Nim forum software is open source, you could setup a chinese forum: https://github.com/nim-lang/nimforum
I don't think automatic translation of english forum would be readable, anyway I don't know if translators translate English <-> Chinese properly
在中国，每个人都需要使用Nim！
在中國，每個人都需要使用Nim！
:-)
I think @Araq and the team should consider hiring a chinese speaker for community management and engagement. Maybe also some “sales” person that can approach the companies and maybe arrange some cooperation.
I imagine there needs to be a sub forum for chinese speakers that is reachable through GFW.
Also everyone needs to be aware that a lot of chinese companies will try questionable things with Nim like it happened to Go with qihoo360.
At a small scale, you should probably start with a WeChat group like there is a Nim Telegram group.
You can ask @gogolxdong , @bung87 and @qqtop for starters.
I think @Araq and the team should consider hiring a Chinese speaker for community management and engagement.
This shouldn't depend on the core team. People in the FLOSS communities should be more proactive - don't wait for "The Center" to give orders.
It would be awesome of any "special interest group" sponsored special Nim communities and project, be it based on spoken language, geographic location, focus priority (ex. web frameworks, desktop apps, etc), or anything else.
Maybe Chinese is indeed special, but generally splitting and fragmenting can be very bad. For example German wikipedia -- english content is in most cases much better and easier to understand than german content. For computer programming -- one of the few good german books I read was from N. Wirth 30 years ago, I am not aware of other really good CS books in german languages. This is even more true for books about physics. My only good experience with native language groups was in the past with Latex and electronics in usenet, something like de.lang.latex and de.sci.electronics. Experience was good, because these communities contained some german speaking experts that time. But Araq and mratsim seems to speak Chinese not that well, so some other chinese speaking experts would be needed.
Generally my impression is that native language groups are fine for kids and very old people. But today learning english is even more important than learning C language, and my feeling is that Chinese people with a scientific background are very good in English.
This shouldn't depend on the core team. People in the FLOSS communities should be more proactive - don't wait for "The Center" to give orders. It would be awesome if any "special interest group" sponsored special Nim communities and projects, be it on the basis of spoken language, geographic location, focus priority (ex. web frameworks, desktop apps, license purity, etc), or anything else.
You need to maintain a certain level of trust. Especially with a large group of people of very different cultural heritage. It's also important to maintain a transparent, official stream of information.
(Sad that IRC is no longer the first chat protocol to be mentioned...) There are already multiple Nim channels on FreeNode, but that's only the beginning. As you can see with Python, for example, it's common to add suffixes for sub-communities, including based on language. So there can be #nim-ru, #nim-de, #nim-zh (for Zhōngwén == Chinese), etc...
Please keep in mind that different cultures have different habits and IRC is irrelevant in some countries. It's important to be where your users are and in this case it's WeChat. Also keep in mind that it's very difficult for chinese users to utilize the resources that are available to western programmers. You can't rely on github or gitlab to be available and it is a hassle for a lot of users to try to get around the GFW.
Some will go the extra mile just because of Go/Rust and for some others they will always rely on Chinese mirrors.
It's also important to think about the politics when engaging with chinese speakers. You can get your website DDoSd by the part if they find out something they dont like. eg. @Ward is i think Taiwanese ?
Generally my impression is that native language groups are fine for kids and very old people. But today learning english is even more important than learning C language, and my feeling is that Chinese people with a scientific background are very good in English.
I strongly disagree. English is not as important as people think it is. Especially not in the East and a lot of people dont really have a need to learn it. Including programmers.
Also chinese presence on GH or anywhere else is really tiny compared to the activity on the "chinese internet".
Thanks for first reply ~ I will let the forum and HomePage run first.
PS: Exactly, the translators are usually not useful enough .
哈哈
我第一个真正跑在生产环境上的程序就是用nim写的.
中文社区的建设目前主要就是靠楼上的 刘小东吧. 我看bilibili上目前有他传的视频。
我觉得go语言的中文社区很好，中国python社区被主导去使用邮件列表， 导致python社区分化不同的地方上。
nim中文社区的建设应该吸取教训、多向go社区学习。