As I described in the earlier posts Nim didn’t support “super calls” when using methods instead of statically bound procs and generics. My article caused a little bit of discussion around this on IRC and Andreas decided to implement the mechanism he already had planned - but had not fully decided a good name for.
The other day Nim 0.11.2 was released and it includes this mechanism. Let’s have a look how it works in my sample code…
Having been a die hard Smalltalker since 1994 I have finally found a new language and community that I am investing myself in. All the Ruby, Python, various JVM languages, C# and Mono etc - none has managed to capture my interest. Ruby and Python always felt like pale shadows of Smalltalk and I really don’t want to be tied to the Java eco system, no matter what. And so on and on, lots of languages looking interesting but not being able to withstand my deeper look. As a Smalltalker I probably have acquired a particular taste.
Since a few months I am however deeply into Nim. I have written a slew of articles about Nim, and at our company we have decided to bet hard on it. So far I have written a little utility called blimp in Nim, and I have helped creating Urhonimo - the Nim wrapper of the Urho3D game engine.
With a deeper understanding of Nim, although I am far from good at it, what is it that makes me recommend you to try it?
Yesterday I had the pleasure of presenting the programming language Nim at the Stockholm GTUG. This evening we were around 50 people, I would guess mainly developers, listening to three presentations:
Now, that’s a pretty fitting trio of languages! :) This article is a little followup because I failed to mention so much stuff…
One of the most important aspects in a language is how powerful and easy it is to use its collection/container types. At least that is my feeling coming from Smalltalk where the Collection classes and their rather rich protocols are used extensively and also cover String and Array and much more. If you peek into the current leading open source Smalltalk - Pharo - you can see Collection allSubclasses size evaluate to 78. Of course, lots of those are special subclasses and not for general use, but fact remains that a strong language needs a strong library of good collections.
In Smalltalk I can for example run this:
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This is actually a single method call taking two closures, one to perform a “filtering”, and one to perform a “map”. This is not a standard message in “good old” Smaltalk-80, but it has eventually been added since the usage pattern is so common. To me personally a modern language needs similar power or I would go nuts. :)
As I described in the earlier posts Nim didn’t support “super calls” when using methods instead of statically bound procs and generics. My article caused a little bit of discussion around this on IRC and Andreas decided to implement the mechanism he already had planned - but had not fully decided a good name for.
The other day this mechanism entered the devel branch which means it will be official in the next release of Nim, which I suspect will be out before the end of 2014. It should be noted that devel is mainly undergoing bug fixing, so unless you are paranoid it’s pretty usable. Now… of course I had to try out super calls in my sample code…