Pardon my satiric pessimism. Nim is my #1 favorite programming language, and I very much hope that it succeeds. But, in answer to this thread's question about the past 9 months, I think there's very little to celebrate. Growth exists, but it's far slower than it should be. People are experimenting with Nim and doing cool things, [dom's book finally hit paper](https://www.amazon.com/Nim-Action-Dominik-Picheta/dp/1617293431), etc - but something is clearly missing.
Nim has many virtues, but it also needs a lot of work to catch up to other languages. A new programming language is like a business: the first million is always the hardest. People need a clear reason to invest their efforts into Nim rather than something else, especially when Nim's competitors are so much bigger. A bigger community means more libraries and tooling, more answers when you $searchEngine a problem, more job / freelancing opportunities, etc. Unless you have Rich Uncle Google (or Apple, Mozilla, etc) to boost you right from the start, breaking through and achieving growth is very hard - but other languages have done it. I think Nim's greatest competitors are Dlang and Crystal - two grass-roots languages that surpassed Nim in popularity. I think the greatest reason for this is vision, clarity of purpose - they had a specific audience that helped lift them off the ground. In these past months DMD also [went after](http://forum.dlang.org/thread/oc8acc$1ei9$1...@digitalmars.com) Nim's permissive license freedom crown, and it has an estimated 872 (79%) [dub packages](http://code.dlang.org/api/packages/dump) that are [copyfree](http://copyfree.org/standard/licenses) (nimble is at 448 or 88% copyfree). The question of "[What is the Nim programming language good for?](https://www.quora.com/unanswered/What-is-the-Nim-programming-language-good-for)" does not (yet) have a clear answer. D and Crystal are clear, even in their names: to be a better modernized C++ or a more solid Ruby. Nim is a mix of many cool ideas: some more practical and some more academic than others; some offer a better C++, some a better in-browser JS target, or Python, or Ada, etc. No one group can have any confidence in what direction Nim will continue to evolve, and how much faith they should put in it making significant progress. [Nim's roadmap](https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/wiki/Roadmap) hasn't been updated in over a year... With a new business, you write a [business plan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_plan) and you knock on a lot of doors (banks, etc) asking for investments, persuading people that in a few years you'll have something great. But you cannot be great at everything all at once: some things will clearly and decisively need to be put on the back-burner. A good business plan doesn't contain a zillion unfocused ideas, but a few ideas that are focused and complementary. I think Nim needs precisely that: a VISION of why, if it's not the best programming language for a specific target audience yet, in a few years it will be, and how it will get there.
