Nim is such an odd combination of "amazing" and "huh, that's just weird". There's a powerful theme — C-like performance with an expressive syntax and automatic

Nim is such an odd combination of "amazing" and "huh, that's just weird". There's a powerful theme — C-like performance with an expressive syntax and automatic memory management — that's undercut by a range of somewhat scatterbrained, idiosynchratic features. Nim's feature set is ambitious, and it really feels like Nim's authors decided to go "breadth first" rather than "depth first", implementing everything but the kitchen without considering that some more complicated ideas could be deferred until the core language was mature; Nim would have benefited from a more conservative, agile, minimalist approach. At least it would have allowed it to reach 1.0 and more widespread adoption earlier. Nim also makes some design choices (first-class iterators, the case insensitivity madness, the massive amount of pragmas, OO inheritance, out arguments, etc.) that I wish would have been left on the drawing board to mature. A casual skim through the top of the commit history indicates that Araq (Andreas Rumpf) is still doing almost all of the development. That's a red flag — being responsible for a complex language, compiler, standard library and documentation is a lot of work. (And it's of course a dangerous bus factor.) I also think it's a mistake to charge for a book at such an early stage when the quality of the official documentation is less than stellar. dom96 is Nim's most active evangelist on HN; if he wants Nim's adoption to take off, making the book available for free should, strategically, be a no-brainer. That said, it's not all negative. If evaluated purely on technical merits, Nim is one of the most promising languages currently in development, and it's one of the languages I intend to use this year for various smaller, experimental projects.