A Python Substitute? I Tried Out the Best Programming Language You’ve Never Heard Of

Meet Nim: the language with Python-like syntax and C efficiency

While quite representative, the image above is for illustrative purposes only, i.e., it isn’t an actual chart of real results. (Image source: Author)

A few weeks ago I was browsing through GitHub and encountered a repo that caught my eye. It hosted a project that was written entirely in Nim.

What the hell is Nim? I thought.

Immediately I concluded this was one of the many programming languages that a lot of people use, but I just was the stupid guy who didn’t know it. But rather than putting it aside, I decided: Let’s learn a bit about this.

I then had two major realizations:

• No, this language is not used by a lot of people.
• But maybe it should be.

So here goes a bit about my experience with Nim, a quick programming tutorial, and why the language seems extremely promising to me.

Show Me the Code!

Here’s a useless program I wrote in Nim:

Looks pretty clean. It also feels so simple that you can probably figure out what it does with no effort…