On: Seq – A programming language for computational gen...

[jpxw]

I know nothing about Nim or genomics. Why is it odd that they didn’t include Nim?

[pietroppeter → jpxw]

Nim has had some success in genomics mainly thanks to the work of https://github.com/brentp

Nim can be sold as a "A strongly-typed and statically-compiled high-performance Pythonic language" as Seq (although it is more than that and does not actually have as a goal to be Pythonic, see https://nim-lang.org/ or https://github.com/Araq/nimconf2021/blob/main/zennim.rst).

Still, given the small size of Nim community and even smaller size of the genomics nim subcommunity, I would say it is not that odd that is not included in the benchmark. The existing nim genomics library might not even cover the functionalities required by the benchmark.

[lf-non → pietroppeter]

Nim is not really 'pythonic'. It does have some superficial similarity with Python (being whitespace sensitive) but it begins to diverge pretty soon. This is not really a criticism of Nim. I quite like many of the choices in Nim.

Seq claims that vast majority of python programs would work as is. I have not validated that claim, but Nim can absolutely not make that claim. Any python library would require substantial porting effort to be translated to nim.

[goodpoint → lf-non]

Nim is pretty pythonic in terms of expressiveness.

Of course Nim is statically typed, but a lot of Python code that does not use dynamic typing heavily can be ported to Python surprisingly easily.

[Zababa → pietroppeter]

Calling Nim Python is like calling OCaml or Scala Python, it's not really true. The main reason people use Python is because it is Python, not because of an extractable list of things.