To avoid misunderstandings: I spoke about _my personal_ perception wrt VSC (but included it nevertheless in my "most important editors" list.
My point isn't about VSC and certainly not about yet another editor war. My point is about Nim. Having become a heavy Nim user (and fan) I look at _any_ editor with Nim in mind. As I mentioned practical usability is a very major factor for a young language. That also means that Nim must have good support for (be supported by) at least the major editors. Developers using Vim, Sublime, [other major dev. editors] _-will-_ look whether Nim is well usable with their editor. The lack of an IDE might be forgiven but editors are among the very core tools of developers and many will even hesitate to switch to a language without support for "their" editor. VSC _is_ a big fat thing; I don't say that to belittle it, I might just as well say that Vim (for many) is a six legged creepy horror editor. The point is that whatever happen to be the major editors (for whatever reasons) MUST have Nim support available - or else quite many people won't use Nim or leave it again soon. And indeed there are quite many leaving Nim again; some of course just had a peek at it anyway but others are more serious and found - _not_ Nim, the language but _working_ with it - unattractive, uncomfortable, etc. I happen to have been one of them re. some young languages and I would in fact have put Nim aside too for the editor (and debugger) reason if Nim had been a little less convincingly great. We should apply Araq's pragmatic view and see what someone who is looking at Nim actually sees. He already _has_ his favourite editor. It's not the editor that is the newbie in his world, it's Nim and hence it's Nim that's (subconsciously) expected to adapt. On Nims side he has some starter tutorials, some articles (one of which might have led him to Nim) some curiosity and probably some mistrust too. I think it's really decisive what that potential new Nim developers first experience is. Is it easy, can he concentrate on the new language and easily play around? (one big plus of Nim: getting the thing itself installed is easy and comfortable). Or does he have to first install this or that specific editor (to reasonably work, have syntax highlighting, etc) or even to build a patched special version of some compiler or gdb or whatnot (yes, there are languages like that. Seriously)? And keep in mind that that Nim newbie does not yet fully see all Nim gives him; for him Nim probably is just another new language (many of which are indeed not worth a lot of effort). The other classical entry is what I'd call group power. Java, C or C# are good examples. "Everybody uses XYZ!", "In our company we develop in XYZ", "A serious server is written in XYZ" give the language a strong advantage, up to the point that the user is usually willing to adapt both himself and his tools. Having done some work in Nim and having seen its beauty and strengths and value are somewhat similar. That's why for example I myself (curse and) use VSC. Nim is worth it, simple as that. But that is _not_ the situation of most people who just are looking at Nim the new language. Looking at the real world it seems Vim, sublime and VSC are the most important editors, so we need support for Nim in those as a bare minimum. Not having that will continue to make it harder to gain traction. That's why I brought up the idea to support the development by small payments (couple of hundred $) of such (and other) vital things. There _are_ people who are capable and willing in our community; that's why we have what we have now. Maybe a friendly small push and some small monetary support could motivate them to enhance their Nim supporting tools and to include better gdb support and other important things. If we achieve that for Vim and sublime we very much gain in attractivity in very, very large developer groups (with millions of developers each). Simple as that. Plus we get more easily digestible for many companies (most of which strongly shy away from changing their tools).
