The original post contains two interesting points that may or may not be connected. The first point, emphasized by the title, is that it (Nim) "all 'just works'". The second point, mentioned in passing, talks about dissatisfaction with the political culture in competing projects encouraging people to try Nim:
> Was reading the comments of a /. article about Rust, which were of course > pointing out the SJW cancer, then somehow got onto Reddit about languages not > so infested with CoC and someone mentioned nim. I've spent many years struggling with various questions in political philosophy, and how they apply to my career in IT, the Internet, and software freedom. I believe that, whether or not there's a written "Code of Conduct" (CoC), all communities form a certain culture that has political characteristics. But perhaps certain political tendencies can help an online community "just work" better than others. The main points I'd like to make here are: (1) you can't avoid politics, (2) agree to disagree, and (3) the non-aggression principle. # Can't Avoid Politics I know that most people don't like "bringing up politics", but the problem is that **a certain political bias already inevitably exists**. Ignoring political topics doesn't make them go away. Perhaps (as OP points out) this is much less of a problem with the Nim community than elsewhere, which is a huge thumbs up for Nim - but Nim is not an island... I would classify the bias that dominates most free software communities as socialist; anti-capitalist, anti- free market, and pro-government. This wouldn't be a problem in of itself - one has a right to hate corporations, move to a commune where everything is shared, etc - up to the point where you call for government force against others. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but problems arise when software code gets entangled with calls for violence against others. As the result, most free software projects are becoming increasingly toxic to people who (like myself) deviate from those views. Most people "go along to get along" and just ignore that political bias, and it is precisely the people who point out this bias who are punished as off-topic political hijackers / "trolls" \- which is very unjust. A few examples, large and small, of what I see as left-wing socialist bias: * The concept of "free software" has been hijacked by the explicitly socialist ideas of [Richard Stallman](https://stallman.org), including that it is necessary and desirable to use government force to "keep software free". The practice of free content predates the idea of copyright (or copyLEFT) by many thousands of years. From oral story-telling to earliest examples of free software, countless people have found it natural and desirable to give away information with no strings attached. And yet the idea of attaching pages and pages of legalese threats backed by government force to so-called "free" software is now seen as normal, while questioning it is seen as "injecting politics". * Back in 2010, someone on the FreeBSD forum [posted a petition](https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/10174/) calling for government intervention in the Sun/Oracle deal. I am no Oracle fan, but I posted replies arguing that government intervention is harmful and unnecessary. This resulted in the moderators deleting my account (including all prior posts, most of which were about FreeBSD), and this incident has given me a not-entirely-irrational phobia of contributing to free software ever since... * IMHO, the worst example of left-wing political hijacking in recent years was all the propaganda for """Net Neutrality""" (an Orwellian term for strengthening blind faith in government to control of the Internet). This has given me additional cause to boycott many Internet institutions, including [Reddit](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/12/net-neutrality-supporters-break-the-internet-in-latest-protest/), [FreeNode](https://freenode.net/news/eu-net-neutrality), and most [especially GitHub](https://medium.com/@jamrizzi/git-rid-of-the-annoying-net-neutrality-github-red-banner-ca0c143d6820). The latter betrayed the trust of millions of non-socialist developers who've been suckered into hosting their projects there - by turning them into tools of socialist propaganda! If you have any content on GitHub, you've spent months as an unwitting signpost for communist lies, whether you like it or not! </rage> What software licenses are most commonly used by a developer community (see [copyfree.org](http://copyfree.org)) and whether it remains married to GitHub are all decisions that have significant political consequences. (Nim is doing relatively well with the former, but not the latter.) # Agree To Disagree In the vast majority of situations, differing beliefs are not really in conflict. You can have your beliefs, and I can have my beliefs. For example, one could say: * You can eat tofu; I can eat steak. We can criticize each-other's choices, through arguments and persuasion rather than force, but hopefully we can eventually find other topics of discussion. * You can use spaces; I can use tabs. You can use import blah; I can use from blah import nil. We can use automated code reformatting tools to see the same code differently. (Note how "agreeing to disagree" encourages technological innovations that make it easier for everyone to get their way.) * In your "SJW" culture you favor "affirmative action" to benefit individuals from demographic groups that have statistically lower rates of achievement. In our libertarian culture, we believe that everyone should be judged on individual merit. You can run your business how you see fit, and I can run my business how I see fit. * The neighborhood WiFi service you're selling slows down nim-lang.org and speeds up oracle.com \- so I will not use your service, and give my money to another ISP instead. The Western Civilization achieved a relatively high degree of religious freedom not by the government regulating a "one true religion", not by banning all religious discussion, and not by it making sure all religions had the same number of adherents, but by the policy of ["separation of church and state"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_church_and_state). I now likewise advocate for a separation of the state from the Internet and the free software ecosystems. # The [Non-Aggression Principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle) There are situations, however, where beliefs are genuinely in conflict and one side must give way. Examples: * Your "right to swing your fist" cannot exist in the same physical space as my "right to not get punched in the face". * Your belief that tofu is better than beef (or vice-versa) does not justify using force against someone who disagrees. * Your wish for a new MacBook (or whatever) does not give you a "right" to just take (steal) one from somebody else. * Your concern that a certain DNA marker, height range, sexual fetish, StarTrek captain preference, or whatever other measurable attribute is underrepresented within a certain online group may be admirable, but it doesn't justify holding a gun to people's heads until your ideal statistical criteria is reached. * You believe that a text-file of legalese you've included in your "free" code is a binding contract that I've automagically agreed to. This untenable legal construct cannot be applied consistently, and there must be a more explicit threshold for what constitutes a binding contract. If you throw away a dollar bill with "by picking this up you hereby automagically consent to being my slave" written on it in tiny ink, your aggression against whoever picks it up will remain unjustified. * Your disagreement with my router's [QoS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_service) settings may encourage you to route your packets through other nodes in the network (thus making the network more resilient), but it does not justify getting the FCC to hold a gun to my head until I reconfigure my router to your liking. The Non-Aggression Principle should be the basis for any CoC, whether written or otherwise. We just need a minimal micro-kernel of rules to resolve conflicts (NO INITIATION OF FORCE!), and we can "agree to disagree" on everything else.
