Please remember the context. This is a "Nim Advocacy & Promotion Strategies" thread that I've started 4 years ago. Other people are free to write their own strategy outline proposals, and of course these are just friendly suggestions that anyone of consequence can easily just ignore.
The question for this thought experiment was how to bring people in, and it wouldn't have been (yet) by promising the most libraries of any programming language, the largest certified employment pool, the smartest AI-enhanced IDE features, etc, etc, etc... There were already lots of programming languages out there (even third-tier ones like Cython, D, Rust, etc) which had many of Nim's virtues and orders of magnitude more users. People who'd take the initial risk on Nim are extraordinary people, and we should embrace that! _How do we find us some wonderful weirdos willing to overlook Nim 's initial shortcomings?_ I've offered several points, and I've put my "Appeal to License Purists" pet peeve pretty much last. I've never said it was the most important thing, just a point for Nim advocacy in specific niches. My reason for bumping this thread was also primarily about the "Appeal to Python Fans" point, commemorating how Python's popularity has more than doubled ([then](https://archive.fo/roUz7#selection-219.0-222.0) vs [now](https://archive.fo/DVa15#selection-317.0-320.0)). > Which niche? I've written extensively about this in the past: people who don't like restrictive licenses (ex. Java), politically biased community rules (ex. Rust), or being a useful idiot for an advertising campaign by a major corporation that doesn't share their values (ex. C#, Go). There are lots of newsfeeds of people criticizing Google, Oracle, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. And copyfree license usage continues to increase - which means more projects that don't want legal restrictions in their build dependencies. These people mostly keep those feelings to themselves at present, because they are very impractical, but this can change. If you'd like an example, here's one that I [recently saw on HN](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18943413): a [clean-room implementation of rsync](https://github.com/kristapsdz/openrsync) that is unencumbered by legal threats and can be included in purist projects like OpenBSD. (My license-nagging of rsync's author many years ago weren't as fruitful as they were with Nim.) But it's sad that, in the 21st century, such tools still have to be written in C... Future free software projects with libertarian principles would benefit from having a language to unite around, and this is something at which [Nim could have been #1](http://archive.fo/YShGX#selection-1243.0-1243.3), far ahead of languages that have thousands times more users, and that would help it achieve escape velocity for going mainstream. > It's only you It's not "only me" even on this site (ex. [1](https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/3473), [2](https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/2687), [3](https://archive.fo/hsjXr#selection-12685.0-12703.383)). But the vast majority of the world's developers aren't on this site - which is the point of this thread! > [...] and so far your contributions consist of rumblings on this forum This is also demonstrably false. Thousands of people have first heard about Nim through my various campaigns over the years. > [...] which are more harmful than helpful for Nim's perception. I'm sorry that you feel that way. (Hmm, perhaps apprehension of such a judgement is why I never contribute any code...) I kinda feel like I'm arguing with God here: yours is the power and the glory, you deserve it entirely, and I am a worthless puddle of slime. Nim is your creation, and you can do whatever you want. I've merely offered some thoughts - if you don't want them, fine, I'll make myself even scarcer... > > Recommended reading: Theo de Raadt's rejection of "safe languages". > > I've read it, it's FUD. That's not the question. The question is whether it is an "Advocacy & Promotion" opportunity for Nim. Theo [said](http://archive.is/MoZi8#selection-59.1586-59.1788): "So we cannot replace any base utility, unless the toolchain to build it is in the base. Adding such a toolchain would take make build time from 40 minutes to hours. I don't see how that would happen." Comparing the added compile time of the leading safe systems languages, and other things I've talked about in the past: Nim should win by a mile!
