While Nim is my favorite language, I can understand that it has a small userbase, for these reasons:
1. No major backer like Google for Go or Mozilla for Rust
2. No killer feature like "memory safety and performance without GC" for Rust, instead a mix of all the reasonable down-to-earth features I want in a programming language
3. Some unique decisions instead of what you're used to from other languages, for example partial case sensitivity
I am a strong proponent of Nim but this is probably the worst idea I have ever encountered in language development. Honestly!
Partial case sensitivity and the special underscore case are features I can live with. Unfortunately this has actually become a stumbling block for a wider adoption of Nim.
All strange special features should be optional, not default.
What makes you think this is default? It most certainly is not and will be removed completely in the future.
Edit: here is a source: http://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html#syntax-strong-spaces ("... if the experimental parser directive #?strongSpaces is used..."). The last time this was discussed I said that it would be removed completely, and I still believe it will be. It's simply not a priority for us right now.
Some of those features are default in Nim, some (strongspaces) are not. I say that all such weird features should be optional in general so that newcomers don't get scared off.
Also case and underscore should work like in C per default since Nim interoperates with C seamlessly anyway. Case insensitivity and ignoring underscore are ok if optional.
If you're consistent about how you space your infix operators, this will have no impact on your code.
If you put space around some operators and not around others, in a way that doesn't correspond to precedence, you're going to confuse anyone who reads your code, in any language.
I like it for distinguishing homonym operators, but not for the precedence stuff they seem to have there. I'd like something like this though:
let a = 10;
a / 5
output> 2
let b = pwd();
b/temp
output> Directory<"~/temp">
b / 2
error> b:Directory does not implement method "divide(:number)"
a/temp
error> a:int does not implement method "get(:string)"
I used both nim (back when it was still nimrod) and rust for a while, before eventually settling on rust. I tried to give nim a chance, and was told that "they will grow on you" ("they" being the things you mentioned that were "unique decisions instead of what you're used to from other languages"). They never did, and though I got used to avoiding the problems I initially had with them, the language just never "felt good" to me.
wow... have never heard of that partial case sensitivity before.
I think this goes beyond syntactic sugar. Holding the hand of the developer too much?
Personally, as a Python programmer I like interfacing with C++ code like Qt via PyQt. If I see a camelCase method I know where it came from, but if I see a PEP-8 style name or method I know it's our own code, not from Qt.
While Nim is my favorite language, I can understand that it has a small userbase, for these reasons:
1. No major backer like Google for Go or Mozilla for Rust
2. No killer feature like "memory safety and performance without GC" for Rust, instead a mix of all the reasonable down-to-earth features I want in a programming language
3. Some unique decisions instead of what you're used to from other languages, for example partial case sensitivity