pietroppeter

Congrats! I had a great time doing a batch remotely from Italy (2.5 years ago), there is a lot of investment in making sure the remote experience is great and it shows!

AFAIK main focus of Nim 3 is about incremental compilation and enabling better developer tooling bringing in innovations experimented in Nimony (key is NIF intermediate format).

The new compile time memory mgmt was the focus of Nim 2 (it is possible there are still improvements)

personal highlight I looked forward to:

- Araq's update on Nimony and Nim 3 (and NIF, which is so cool)

- Constantin's love letter to Nim (long overdue and I expect to connect strongly with this one)

- Treeform talking about Nim and AI (always very clean and inspiring presentations)

- Capocasa's testimony about building a (economic) coding agent in Nim

- Gianmarco talking about Nim for embedded

- Peter telling the story on how he introduces Nim to his company's new hires

I am pretty sure the general quality will be good and there will be hidden pearls (last year pearl for me was the one about putting Nim on e-ink screens all over the house)

(you won't find name of authors in the conf page but you will find them in the youtube playlists)

Two tracks this year (a first).

As usual, videos are prerecorded and released as YouTube Premiere.

Track 1: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHI4D93Ts8_k&si=06qsQgYUd...

Track 2: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHUPmLYoCMoY&si=iMwL7UeIO...

Related project discussed here 2 years ago FrameOS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38855337

You can easily make the case that Tadej Pogačar is one of the world’s best athletes. Plus he enjoys a wholesome reputation, a cherubic look at races and a cheerful presence on social media. Good luck finding someone who knows him to say a bad word. He ought to be the face of Kelloggs cereal, Gillette razors, Pepsi Cola or Visa cards. Maybe all of them at the same time. Crypto? Meh, but why not. But Ku Coin?

If you happen to pass by Ivrea (short trip from Turin or Milan) there is a very nice small museum which showcases most of the machines mentioned. It has also a working Programma 101 and if you are lucky there might be a volounteer that can demo it. There also volounteer giving guided tours and if you are with kids you have the option to have them do a workshop (includes some 3d printing).

https://www.museotecnologicamente.it/category/collezione/

Great work! As a side track, it led me to dive into the history of the manufacturing company of Breda trains. Originally founded in Milan late 1800s by Ernesto Breda for locomotives, expanded in the war products during the wars, and went through nationalization, fusion to become AnsaldoBreda and later bough by Japanese to become Hitachi Rail Italy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitachi_Rail_Italy

I wish we had that for Nim too!

Yet another appreciation story for Miguel’s mega tutorial. In 2017 I used it to create our wedding site and learn a bit of web dev (my background is in data science). To motivate me to actually do it I used the strategy the fund the then occurring refactoring of the tutorial. I am still very fond and proud of that first time I actually went and funded some open source effort, it gives you back more than you might expect

And this fact effectively builds trust in the vision and in execution.

For the curious on how it works (not mentioned in the readme), it uses pymupdf and a precise mapping of all information in area coordinates, as such the document layout is hard coded.

When layout changes this breaks but layout changes on this sort of documents do not happen often (I think). Also code is very clean and it serms straightforward to fix.

This kind of code is maybe something that can be generated from an LLM/agent? (It would be easy to write checks)

Besides the practical value for those who might need it, I think it is possibly interesting for others to look at this approach.

Neat project, thanks for sharing!

This is the way

I am a bit biased on the content ;), but note that this is a talk that is not focused on teaching the language but more on what does it mean to learn a second language, especially a niche one - like Nim - coming from Python. It does shows some code examples and highlights some features though. I like official documentation (tutorials) but Nim basics is another good resource.

When I first learned Nim I remember the thing I struggled the most with was the mutability of parameters when passing them. Another big thing I would say is letting go of python’s dict and embrace types. In place of dict I usually consider the following options: tuples (which are great and named), objects, tables (from stdlib, very similar to dicts but with homogenous types for keys and values) and JsonNode (as a final option if the others do not work).

Advent of code makes for a great practice ground.

Thomas Snyder, the creator of this blog (who gathered a number of contributors throughout the years; recently slowed down the content) is a puzzle grandmaster and recently mind behind the popular LinkedIn queens game. Lots of great content on this website.

Related, interview about LinkedIn games: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/king-queens-world-sudoku-cham...

Gold

Kate is not a technologist but writes beautifully. I find this a very interesting piece.

I particularly like this quote towards the end:

At its core, the computer and the Internet are tools for creation, education, commerce, play, and communication.

Currently doing this Discrete Optimization course by Pascal Van Hentenryck and it is great: https://www.coursera.org/learn/discrete-optimization

It has only week on Linear Programming which is nicely done but I think the real value is that it starts with the much more playful Constraint programming and focuses on intuitions and keeping you both entertained and trained which is really hard to do.

The course comes with assignments and the whole thing sort of has a Advent of Code flavor (I kind of have a half baked plan on make this year discrete optimization my AOC theme).

Not strong on the modeling part/business motivation.

:starred_eyes:

Zapping!

I should have looked for this before posting the same comment. Upvoted :)

@dang maybe the link could now be updated with this one https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/kz4khcgdsfdv

The link here is better than the dupe though

I have never heard any serious criticism about this feature for anyone actually trying the language.

When there was a proposal to remove it just for the sake of this kind of arguments I actually took time to think about it and I actually ended it liking it.

There has been good effort recently put in tooling https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/12083

After having worked with Teams, Slack, Discord, … Zulip for me is the best. A mix of forum and chat, great search capabilities, customizable notifications. You feel empowered to decide how to filter the noise that can happen in a big community and when to jump in and participate.

just out of curiosity I wanted to check whether I had some goo.gl links that I might want to migrate but apparently goo.gl now redirects to this announcement.

Would be happy to know if there is a way to access goo.gl links created while logged in with my account.

Love how they misspelled Piantadosi as Paintadosi :)

Calling out about the second announcement (erdosproblems.com) that there is a call for help and I think many people here might be able to help and some may be happy to do it. Skills required include GitHub, web design, Python/Html/Sql, …

Details: https://www.erdosproblems.com/help

It is written purely in Python and does not use Clang, which makes it fast to run—usually in just a couple of seconds.

Oh, the irony