Topic: Nim

Ni is my own little language heavily influenced by Smalltalk but also other sources like Rebol, Forth, Lisp, Self and Nim. Ni is a bit strange, but it’s not academic and really meant to become something useful.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

In my exploration of Nim the turn has come to see how we can use Nim together with Squeak.

In the previous article when I explored OO mechanisms in Nim I felt I dropped the ball a bit in my Fruit example. This is a followup.

So previously in Nim and OO Part II we saw how we could solve the “super call” issue using only procs and generics in Nim. This means that all code is statically bound.

Nim is presented as an imperative language. And yes, it has some of its roots in the Pascal line of languages, but it also has a set of powerful abstraction mechanisms making it very suitable for object oriented programming. And when I write “object oriented” I am referring to a broader flexible sense of OO in which objects can be formulated with attached behavior, polymorphism between different objects, some kind of reuse model of code (inheritance etc) and some type of dynamic dispatch.