Re: Convincing my friend about Nim
He has a different opinion to you, it doesn't matter. Jut have a little laugh if he complains about Nim. It's not worth losing a friendship over.
Re: Convincing my friend about Nim
The one and only advantage of C# and VB.Net is the best in class IDE visual studio. If Nim has an IDE like visual studio, then Nim is the king among all languages. Really.
Re: Convincing my friend about Nim
Oh funny, one reason I was attracted to Nim was because it _was_ immediately readable to me, that its focus was about readability and representation. This, compared to rust, for example, which makes me start clenching my teeth. If a language goes down that rabbit hole, then it should just be like APL and actually be a new language with new symbols and everything so as to remain concise. /rant Okay, so what does that mean about your friend? Well, sounds like they just haven't used many languages, so they don't have the experience to really judge.
Re: Convincing my friend about Nim
Pardon me but it seems that you should change friends rather than language. What your friend said about Nim being incomprehensible for people who don't know Nim is simply ridiculous BS. If I were in your place -[and](https://forum.nim-lang.org/postActivity.xml#and) \- for whatever weird reason - wanted to keep that friend I's simply tell him "You are right. Thanks, I've seen the light. But as I'm a weird guy I'll play a bit more with that language Nim although c# is so so much better". That should help as it would address and sooth both major factors, namely your friends cluelessness and his urgent desire to be "right". (But then, neither am I in your place nor would I hesitate a split second to tell such a moron Adios...).
Re: Convincing my friend about Nim
First, I'd like to thank you for all the answers. You really gave me some good knowledge about how I could approach my friend. However, he's found another argument I really can't beat with my own knowledge. He says Nim's unreadable for programmers coming from other languages. My main contr-argument was that you can always read the documentation; heck, the tutorial for the language is well-written and easy to understand. But he keeps bragging that he doesn't want to read any docs; he just wants to understand code in any language. For me, that really shows his ignorance and lazyness. It's not really hard to deduce Nim's language features, some may be easier to deduce than others, but if I wouldn't know Nim and read the codebase of, for example, `nimforum`, as @Araq suggested, I'd at least try to understand the code using my knowledge from other languages. I probably wouldn't understand what `proc` means, or ``*`, or how generics are written, but by looking at more source code I'd be able to deduce what at least 2 of those 3 examples do (can you guess which is the hardest to deduce?). But the fact is, every developer is different, some may be too lazy to even look at something's source code, or too lazy to try and deduce the functions of different operators. You cannot develop software without the use of documentation, and that's what he doesn't understand and keeps bragging about. Again, thank you for all the answers, and happy new year!
Re: Convincing my friend about Nim
I had a similar gang of "friends" a couple of years ago. We used to hang out on an IRC network that they ran, eventually I decided to just leave it because having them complain about Nim every time I wanted to discuss one of my projects became far too tiring. Many of the languages they were proponents of were niche too, one example was [ooc](https://ooc-lang.org/). They didn't stay loyal to these languages for long and the language's themselves were abandoned by their authors. So yeah... you likely won't be able to get through to your friend. If possible, just ignore them.
Re: Convincing my friend about Nim
> First of all, he states that not having such an indentation-based syntax
> allows for more freedom ...
He is right in that but only in one regard: Having explicit block markers (like
{ and } or `begin` and `end`) allows for (visually largely unstructured)
"streams" of code. If that were really, really needed, one could however
introduce a "3 spaces" symbol, say '°'.
It might be noteworthy that quite some studies, typically made in the context
of some entity seriously needing that question answered, have clearly shown
that readability _is_ important, in fact _very_ important. While I know of no
study addressing indentation based blocks vs marker based blocks it seems
reasonable to assume that both are clearly on the good side (remember: The
issue is (only) readability). The studies that were made all and consistently
demonstrated that "curly blocks" are clearly the worst approach (~ worst
readability) and introduce significantly more errors and are significantly
worse to maintain.
> First of all, he really dislikes the lack of brackets, and the "misuse" of
> them
I would (mildly) agree. It _does_ make sense to have `[]` meaning "something
array like" always (although I personally and subjectively - and unreasonably -
prefer [] over <>). More importantly however I reject your friends criticism
because It's basically just based on "it's not c# like and hence it's bad!".
That's, Pardon me, just stupid.
> Next up, an "invalid" argument. He says macros are dumb, and you could just
> write code normally without them.
Very wrong. Obviously your friend, like so many in the curly braces camp, fails
to understand the concept of readability which is closely linked to
maintainability and probability of errors. Probably your friend has become a
victim of the (utterly stupid) "fun" paradigm (Typical statements are "It's fun
to develop in XYZ" or "I'm a developer because it's fun") - that camp has been
found to be responsible to a very large degree for the major clusterf_ck we're
in today (e.g. funny bug of the month in SSL).
They are, Pardon my french, braindead morons. Here is the truth and the only
one in that regard: software development is an _engineering_ discipline - and a
very complex one at that. If the "fun" camp guys were also in bridge building,
railroads, air traffic etc. humanity probably would be largely extinguished by
now (the survivors living deep in the woods, far away from killing
"civilization" with tech).
Just like with bridges or railroads the relevant factor is absolutely _not_
whether those who designed and built it felt it was "fun" to do but whether the
result was reliable, meeting the needs, etc.
Macros not only allow for comfort but more importantly they allow for
"centralized code fragments". And that is directly linked to probability of
error as well as to maintainability. Just have a look at crypto code; you'll
almost invariably find (long) macros. Often the very core of an algorithm is
implemented in one or more macros. And I think even your friend would accept
that the people who gave us AES or Blake2 certainly aren't stupid.
Whenever some halfway responsible entity _really, really_ needed reliable and
bug free software they turned to languages like Ada, Eiffel, Ocaml, etc. (along
with _formal_ spec., modelling, and verification) as soon as and when such
options were available. Hell, even Pascal was used because it might not have
been a "nice" language but it offered many of the features high reliability
scenarios required.
So, to summarize it somewhat rudely: why would you even care about the opinion
of someone who doesn't have even the slightest clue what he talking about? You
are like some engineer debating with an idiot whose arguments basically are "my
(make shifted wannabe) crap is "cool" and "fun" while your (properly working
and reliable) bridges and railroad systems are boring and uncool!.
Btw, I myself am not at all against .Net (any more). For one it incl. Mono
(nowadays) offers reasonably good and wide linux support, too and isn't a pure
Windows world thingie any more. More importantly though, Microsoft (funnily
unknown to many) has invested tons and tons of money in safety, reliability,
and security research and has really done a lot of work and has created much
progress in that field. Just think of Z3 ( _the_ solver), Boogie (an "easy"
interface language for Z3), code contracts (i.a. for c#!), Dafny (a safety
targeting language that actually works) and more. With their async/await work
they have tried to make .Net also useable for servers but although they seem to
have done it well I personally and subjectively limit my .Net use for business
applications.
Well noted this comes from someone whose first (and then beloved) language was
C (and, I have to admit it, then I also was a "coolness" obsessed idiot) and
who taught C. In fact I still sometimes implement certain tricky things in C
because Nim does
Re: Convincing my friend about Nim
Maybe show him `nimforum`'s source code or any other project that's DSL-heavy, readable and concise.
Re: Convincing my friend about Nim
I have this feeling that the particular quote of Araq will become really famous and be remembered. So happy I was the one asking! :D
Re: Convincing my friend about Nim
Tell him that triple-digit iq is required to understand nim's greatness
Re: Convincing my friend about Nim
I need a work break so this is a bit long :p If your friend isn't just having fun with you, then I wouldn't try explaining it, but focus on accepting the difference to stay friends. This squabble happens a lot in the young tech crowd, but really any young crowd. Your friend is adopting what sounds like the attitude of someone who is afraid and doesn't yet know how to deal with it. That might sound strong, but most things we do are guided by fear or other primal emotions. Guessing they are in secondary school or early university, it may take them another 5-10 years (that's being generous) to develop the personal awareness and introspection to ask themselves why they are having this reaction. Only then could you have a reasonable conversation with them. Some possible reasons for that fear may be your friend is afraid to branch out from C#, because learning [all of] C# is such a monumental task they couldn't imagine doing more (it is a bloated language after all). Or perhaps they are afraid you will learn stuff they won't know and they like to have an upper hand with you. Or maybe they're afraid all their effort in learning C# is wasted (it's not) if there's actually other newer cooler languages they "should've" been focusing on. There are many possibilities, but I would bet they are afraid of something. Cheers.
Re: Convincing my friend about Nim
Tell him the truth: C# is a kitchen-sink language for microsoft fans which is less expressive than nim and it also has a slower and bloated runtime.
Re: Convincing my friend about Nim
Opinions are a dime a dozen, no guarantee that any opinion is superior. If you do have strong opinions, enjoy them while they last.
Re: Convincing my friend about Nim
I never seen C# outside of MS Windows and related.
Just say that indentation brackets on Nim are written like `#{` and `#}` ;P
Re: Convincing my friend about Nim
Tell him he is right on all matters. [https://tanndera.com/pin/the-secret-to-eternal-happiness](https://tanndera.com/pin/the-secret-to-eternal-happiness)/
Convincing my friend about Nim
Hello, First of all, I don't want to hate on other languages, or anything. I don't have anything against other languages' syntaxes, and I'm OK with people using them. But I have a friend who has recently "turned against me" – when I started using Nim, he started being really angry (no, really, he just started saying I'm stupid, etc) that I'm not using a normal (multiple quotes intentional) language. His main argument is Nim's syntax, even though he's never really tried to code in the language. He's pretty much a C# fanboy, he says the syntax is perfect and "it can run on many platforms" (I strongly disagree with that). My main argument is that if he'd finally start coding in an ergonomic language like Python or Nim, he'd finally feel how easy it is to write and read code in it. What he dislikes the most, is the indentation-based syntax, and a few other "weirdnesses" you don't see in typical languages. First of all, he states that not having such an indentation-based syntax allows for more freedom, even though he doesn't indent his code badly. I think this argument is just stupid, taking into account all of his programming practices. But the main deal is about the syntax features themselves. I'm going to use this code sample to describe the problems he has with the syntax: type Box[T] = object value: T proc box*[T](value: T): Box[T] = result = Box(value: value) Run First of all, he really dislikes the lack of brackets, and the "misuse" of them. As I said, he's really used to C#, and thinks the generics syntax is stupid. His problem with it is the use of squared brackets `[T]` instead of angled brackets ``. I thought it was a weird decision too, but later found out it didn't really clash with the rest of the language and worked really well. Pretty much all of his jokes now rely on this argument, even though it's a preference and he shouldn't hate the language just because his preferences are different. Next up, an "invalid" argument. He says macros are dumb, and you could just write code normally without them. I sort of agree with him, but no. Macros are really useful, especially when you have to write a ton of repetitive code when you want to embed a scripting language for your application, or something similar. His last argument is that Nim is not very popular. I left it for last, because it's not an argument – you can't judge something by how popular it is. I tried approaching him with a quote from Araq: > Nim's target audience is the enlightened/misguided programmer who doesn't > understand why there should be more than one programming language. And yet, he keeps being stubborn about his opinion. How can I convince him to at least stop hating the language so much, or to change his decision and try out the language?
