I’ve been researching programming languages to find a good, high level language that compiles to a single binary that is preferably pretty small. After tons of research, I landed on Nim and used it to make a quick txt parser for a project I’m doing.
Nim seems absolutely fantastic. Despite being sold as a systems programming language, it feels like Python without any of its drawbacks (it’s fast, statically typed, etc.) - and the text parser I made is only a 50kb binary!
Has anyone here tried Nim? What’s your experience with it? Are there any hidden downsides aside from being kinda unpopular?
Bonus: I want to give a shoutout to how easy it is to open a text file and parse it line-by-line in this language. Look at how simple and elegant this syntax is:
import os
if paramCount() == 0:
quit("No file given as argument", 1)
let filepath = paramStr(1)
if not fileExists(filepath):
quit("File not found: " & filepath, 1)
for line in lines(filepath):
echo line
We moved past it because everone realized it was a stupid idea. Rust, go, etc abandoned it and rightly so. It causes more problems than it’s worth.
A more fundamental difference between Rust and Python is essentially that the former is expression-based whereas the latter is statement-based, so arguably you need delimiters for code blocks in Rust because an expression can contain a block that itself has statements in it, whereas there is (sadly) no equivalent in Python. (Having said that, even if this weren’t the case, it would probably still have used curly braces for delimiters because it wants to look a bit like C++ to make it more palatable for that group, not because deep wisdom was involved.)
There are lots of things to not like about Python, but the lack of curly brackets that would just be redundant anyway is not one of them. You hardly alone in your opinion, but you are not speaking for “everyone” either.
I deal with the syntax on a daily basis though. Moving code around is objectively more difficult with Python since IDEs can’t always know where the block should be tabbed to. Sometimes it is correct at guessing, sometimes not. And when it’s not all I can think of is “why the fuck am I dealing with this?”. It’s a non-issue in proper languages. Just simply doesn’t exist. The IDE there can know where things should be tabbed to. It’s a problem created explicitly by the language syntax.
I work with Python on a daily basis as well and this has never been a big deal for me. So in short: speak for yourself.
Meanwhile, Python is one of the most widely used programming languages.
If a zillion people do a silly thing, it’s still a silly thing.
The point is it’s a dumb, old argument that apparently hasn’t affected adoption of the language. Python is immensely useful and significant whitespace is a big, fat nothingburger. It’s just silly to still be debating it after all these years. The time for that was like 30 years ago.
Yeah, it’s like going to a restaurant and only judging the food by the restaurant’s decor. It is arguing something that doesn’t matter and most people get over it after they’ve worked in a number of languages.
It just doesn’t matter and instead adds noise to the language feedback loop for something that isn’t changing and isn’t a problem to begin with.