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I think you hit the nail on the head. I've been following the Nim forum and the IRC channel for a while and, while I fully agree with dom96 about Rumpf not bein

I think you hit the nail on the head. I've been following the Nim forum and the IRC channel for a while and, while I fully agree with dom96 about Rumpf not being the only developer, still find the difference with communities like Julia (which I closely follow as well) sometimes staggering. The hypothesis that the lack of success of Nim is due to its not being supported by some organisation like Google or Mozilla does not explain why Julia has many more contributors and its development proceedes at a much quicker pace. AFAIK there is no such organisation behind Julia's development. I've seen more than one time discussions on the Nim forum die of a sudden death after Araq just joined and said something against the idea being discussed. I've never seen something like in the Julia mailing list. Like wbhart, I think this happens mainly because there isn't just one core developer.

dom96 12y ago
From what I can see Julia has a lot of academic institutions behind it. Take a look at the contributors and you will see lots of mention of MIT and Harvard. I may be wrong but I am assuming that those institutions are sponsoring the development of Julia. Nim has no such support from anyone!
- wbhart 12y ago
  I doubt academic institutions "sponsor" programming languages, other than paying the salary of some of the people who happen to be writing them. Where is Rumpf? MIT? http://web.mit.edu/nimrod-lang/arch/i386_linux26/doc/tutorial.html http://web.mit.edu/nimrod-lang/arch/i386_linux26/doc/tutoria...
  - dom96 12y ago
    I'd say that the academic institutions may be paying some of these people to develop Julia. As far as I know, Andreas Rumpf does not work for MIT or any academic institution if that's what you're implying. It is rather curious that the MIT website has a copy of Nim's documentation.
    - wbhart 12y ago
      I'm not really implying that. Somewhere or other it says Andreas is working for a top secret startup and is always trying to start his own. What I'm saying is that it can be misleading how much academic institutions are "behind" academic projects. If you talk to most academics, you'll discover that they believe their academic institutions are doing everything they can to discourage their projects (academics can be somewhat sarcastic). Some of the Julia core devs are academics and write papers on Julia, yes. Their salaries are paid by those institutions. They may have students who can do some coding for them (so long as they write a thesis too). But being an academic is a very demanding lifestyle. With few exceptions, you are paid to write papers, teach, do administration and apply for grants, not to write code.
      - dom96 12y ago
        I think it's more likely that a couple of the developers are being paid to write Julia than it is that they are all working on it in their spare time. While it may be a demanding lifestyle, you are also paid to do research. And research could include developing new programming languages.
- deleted 12y ago
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dom96 12y ago

From what I can see Julia has a lot of academic institutions behind it. Take a look at the contributors and you will see lots of mention of MIT and Harvard. I may be wrong but I am assuming that those institutions are sponsoring the development of Julia. Nim has no such support from anyone!

wbhart 12y ago
I doubt academic institutions "sponsor" programming languages, other than paying the salary of some of the people who happen to be writing them. Where is Rumpf? MIT? http://web.mit.edu/nimrod-lang/arch/i386_linux26/doc/tutorial.html http://web.mit.edu/nimrod-lang/arch/i386_linux26/doc/tutoria...
- dom96 12y ago
  I'd say that the academic institutions may be paying some of these people to develop Julia. As far as I know, Andreas Rumpf does not work for MIT or any academic institution if that's what you're implying. It is rather curious that the MIT website has a copy of Nim's documentation.
  - wbhart 12y ago
    I'm not really implying that. Somewhere or other it says Andreas is working for a top secret startup and is always trying to start his own. What I'm saying is that it can be misleading how much academic institutions are "behind" academic projects. If you talk to most academics, you'll discover that they believe their academic institutions are doing everything they can to discourage their projects (academics can be somewhat sarcastic). Some of the Julia core devs are academics and write papers on Julia, yes. Their salaries are paid by those institutions. They may have students who can do some coding for them (so long as they write a thesis too). But being an academic is a very demanding lifestyle. With few exceptions, you are paid to write papers, teach, do administration and apply for grants, not to write code.
    - dom96 12y ago
      I think it's more likely that a couple of the developers are being paid to write Julia than it is that they are all working on it in their spare time. While it may be a demanding lifestyle, you are also paid to do research. And research could include developing new programming languages.
deleted 12y ago
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