I don't know if AI code gen helped with this particular project, so please forgive my small tangent; Claude Code is surprisingly good at writing Nim. I just created a QuickJS + MicroPython wrapper in Nim with it last week, and it worked great!
Don't let "but the Rust/Go/Python/JavaScript/TypeScript community is bigger!" be the default argument. I see the same logic applied to LLM training data: more code means more training data, so you should only use popular languages. That reasoning suggests less mainstream languages are doomed in the AI era.
But the reality is, if a non-mainstream language is well-documented and mature (Nim's been around for nearly 20 years!), go for it. Modern AI code gen can help fill in the gaps.
tl;dr: If you want to use Nim, use Nim! It's fun, and now with AI, easier than before.
Is there a reasonably good IDE for Nim that provides debugging, specifically the full debugging experience (Nim code rather than C, breakpoints, inspect/modify values, etc.)? That's been the gating factor for me trying it. What's the present situation?
I see comments like this fairly often and in my entire career (I'm 53) I've never had to use a debugger. For inspection of values, I write small functions and unit tests or just output to stderr in debug modes set with env vars. I've always thought that the need to use a debugger was a code smell- too much cyclomatic complexity of single functions.
My experience has been the same. I have found it much easier to write good Nim and F# code with Claide Code, than say modern Python with type hints everywhere.
Both Nim and F# have strong types and strict compilers (arguably more strict in case of F#). These factors matter a lot more than how much code there is for the LLM to train on. And there probably is less ostensibly bad Nim and F# code out there than old Python code written by people who were not really developers, so the training data set is higher quality.
I don't know if AI code gen helped with this particular project, so please forgive my small tangent; Claude Code is surprisingly good at writing Nim. I just created a QuickJS + MicroPython wrapper in Nim with it last week, and it worked great!
Don't let "but the Rust/Go/Python/JavaScript/TypeScript community is bigger!" be the default argument. I see the same logic applied to LLM training data: more code means more training data, so you should only use popular languages. That reasoning suggests less mainstream languages are doomed in the AI era.
But the reality is, if a non-mainstream language is well-documented and mature (Nim's been around for nearly 20 years!), go for it. Modern AI code gen can help fill in the gaps.
tl;dr: If you want to use Nim, use Nim! It's fun, and now with AI, easier than before.
Sorry, I don't really do debuggers... I mostly step through code interactively using a REPL (INim).
Both Nim and F# have strong types and strict compilers (arguably more strict in case of F#). These factors matter a lot more than how much code there is for the LLM to train on. And there probably is less ostensibly bad Nim and F# code out there than old Python code written by people who were not really developers, so the training data set is higher quality.
shoutout if you got that [reference](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Z7PH36ZAao4)