I found out that today is Python's 32nd birthday, as it was February 20th, 1991 the day Guido Van Rossum shared python on a usenet forum (see refs below) and I was wondering about a potential date for Nim's birthday.
I know from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim_(programming_language) that Nim was officially released in 2008 after @araq started development in 2005. I was wondering if there is an actual day that could be considered Nim's birthday for that and if there was some traceable initial message. Closest I could find is to track the first commits available from github repo and picked actually second commit done on June 23rd 2008 (https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/tree/916c25f9a70b68eb7a5e2c45d7cc2e10c6e3a525) where the message is "initial release" (note that it actually says "Copyright (c) 2004-2008 Andreas Rumpf.")
So @araq what's the story there (if there is one)?
Btw, I also tracked the first commit not from Araq, which is by @dom96 and dates to March 10th, 2022 (less than a couple of years later): https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/tree/c6b4d0e5ccd45ed3ac2414161b567e0135b277f4
refs:
note: I know it is quite a stretch to apply this birthday concept to a programming language but it still is a fun thing to think about...
The birthday should be the day the first bootstrapping was done. But I don't know when that was. :-)
Yes, Nim is pretty old at this point, it was quite ahead of its time.
The birthday should be the day the first bootstrapping was done. But I don't know when that was. :-)
according to this old (2014) archive page of nim website first bootstrapping was with version 0.6 which was released on August, 22nd 2008:
2008-08-22 Version 0.6.0 released
Nimrod version 0.6.0 has been released! This is the first version of the compiler that is able to compile itself!
this means Nim's 25th birthday is in 3 days, next Tuesday!
btw, I imagine nim website came later than 2008, how was the existence of nim first shared with others? is there some public message somewhere?