Nim needs to move it's discussions to a mailing list if the authors want to gain more serious developers onboard.
Polling a poorly implemented web forum speaks leaps and bounds about the kind of attitude you need to have to discuss, develop or debug issues around the Nim toolchain.
This is something that Nim developers can instantly do to boost the attractiveness of the language.
Please, do this. [1]
What does everybody think about this? I know that one of our Fearless Leaders, dom96, already commented there at HN. But what does everybody else think?
I personally like mailing lists. But there's already so much discussion in so many places, I'm not sure if we need yet another one.
I've subscribed to the github issues and pull requests, which github even identifies as a mailing list. You can even reply directly by mail. That counts as the development mailing list for me
Meanwhile the forum is more for general questions and discussions. I read the forum exclusively in a feed reader, which is good enough for me. A mailing list mode could be added to the forum, but that's quite some work and I'm not sure it's worth it.
Right now there is no mailing list. Also, I don't use the IRC channel for discussing. None of these facts prevent me from collaborating to Nim with pull requests and feedback through GitHub.
The people who are saying "I would contribute iff there was a mailing list" just want a new channel of reading entertainment for their inboxes because they are bored. If you want to contribute you find a way.
I don't know if this is a young vs old thing or not, but I personally always preferred forums over mailing list. Maybe because I grew up discussing stuff on forums rather than mailing lists or usenet? I find there is a much higher barrier to start participating in discussions when it's on a mailing list, because you have to get the whole forum pushed to your mailbox just to participate.
However, it would be nice to have the option of using e-mail with this forum. It shouldn't be too hard?
I'm unlikely to contribute much to nim development, but expecting to give nim a serious shot after reading various HN and blog posts over the last couple of months. (Planning to rewrite ~20K lines of python 2 code in both rust and nim in the next few months to see which ends up being more pleasant in practice.)
I was surprised there was no nim mailing list to sign up for. A mailing list (or mailing list / forum gateway) would be more convenient to follow, and imo would give a more serious (less idiosyncratic) impression of the nim project. The nim language/compiler/libraries seems very practical and elegant, but some minor issues around the community like the lack of a mailing list makes it seem less serious than the rust effort.
so a language can only be serious if it have a mailing list! funny
and by the way if I am not wrong, Rust mainly use Reddit and Stackoverflow as preferred way for their communication, isn't it ? Their Mailing list seem not have an intensive usage (not even present on the home page).
For my part I found the Forum very practical, and I have create a Nimrod forum thread activity on my Thunderbird for notification, work well.
I am the one that registered the list at freelists, although I checked with Andreas first. Here is a post to it where I try to list a few pros/cons:
https://www.freelists.org/post/nim-dev/Mailinglist-vs-the-forum
I don't want to remove the forum. But I also really do want a mailinglist. :) We will see where this leads. I can also say that this exact same discussion is ongoing in Rust (they have both ml and Discourse) and probably many other communities. Personally I lean towards having both, possibly with some kind of idea on what goes where.
And integrating the forum with the list is also an idea, though I am unsure about feasibility and effects of that.
Only problem is that dealing with SMTP and spam. The best thing would to be go through a service that abstract email to an API, but those usually have a monthly fee.
I prefer mailing lists to forums as a mailing list gives you a single interface to all the projects you participate in. Forums always have you jumping from browser page to browser page.
With mailing lists your mail client notifies you when a message arrives. The only real problem with mailing lists is that there is no accept standard for proper syntax highlighting and code formatting like Markdown etc.
Another advantage of mailing lists is that you can accumulate years of group knowledge in your mail client on you own system which you can index and search, or even upload back to a website if the mailing lists get closed.
I do not like mailing lists.
90% of the topics being discussed will not interest 90% of the users.
And most of the spam I get is from spammers harvesting emails from mailing lists.