Chapter 1. Why Nim?
This chapter covers
- What Nim is
- Why you should learn about it
- Comparing Nim to other programming languages
- Use cases
- Strengths and weaknesses
Nim is still a relatively new programming language. In fact, you’re holding one of the very first books about it. The language is still not fully complete, but core aspects, like its syntax, the semantics of procedures, methods, iterators, generics, templates, and more, are all set in stone. Despite its newness, there has been significant interest in Nim from the programming community because of the unique set of features that it implements and offers its users.
This chapter answers questions that you may ask before learning Nim, such as why you might want to use it. In this chapter, I outline some of the common practical uses of Nim, compare it to other programming languages, and discuss some of its strengths and weaknesses.
Nim is a general-purpose programming language designed to be efficient, expressive, and elegant. These three goals are difficult to achieve at the same time, so Nim’s designers gave each of them different priorities, with efficiency being the most important and elegance being the least.
But despite the fact that elegance is relatively unimportant to Nim’s design, it’s still considered during the design process. Because of this, the language remains elegant in its own right. It’s only when trade-offs between efficiency and elegance need to be made that efficiency wins.