Hi all
I had a rough idea, and wanted to share.
Do you know those ludum dare games, where people write a simple game in 1-2 days?
Nim is pretty productive, why not do something similar, let's say every two weeks?
This can both "showoff" Nim, help new users learn from experienced ones, and show us also what is missing, in terms of libraries, or a more effective way of work.
Ideally, people would record their screen.
Can you write a (simple) program in Nim in a few hours or a day? complete with gui? A few ideas: think of something that would be useful. It can do just one thing, or it can be very simplistic but with some benefit. it can even be a clone of a known program, so you know what to expect. (small programs. on the level of a stopper, timer, id3 rename, audio extract, mailbox parser, alarms manager, or a winzip clone, whatever.)
the rules can be that you are allowed to have beforehand: a graphical mockup, a text file with your design and can also do research as to what you'll need, such as APIs to call or libraries to use.
Then you optionally record your screen, and start development. Within a set amount of time, you hand your work.
A bonus is a so called "postmortem", that is, what part delayed you most or confused you, or was a showstopper meaning you couldn't complete your app or tool.
i think this can draw quite a lot of programmers to Nim, when they see the ease of use, the cool libs, the fast compiler...
Anyway, that was my idea. You can tweak it as you want. Can be a cool thing to do for this community. What do you think? kobi