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Re:Show HN: NimForum – A lightweight alternative to Discourse by beagle3 on Saturday May 26, 2018 @10:31AM (#17162232)
Nim is awesome - the programming language, the community, and the emerging ecosystem. Live example, for discussing the Nim programming language: https://forum.nim-lang.org/ ; Dominik Picheta (dom96), the main author of NimForum, is one of the core Nim language developers and is one of the people making the Nim community so awesome. Thanks, Dom.

The Nim developers practice dogfooding, and NimForum is one result of that practice. I haven't had much mileage with this new version (the actual Nim forum was updated just a couple of days ago), but the previous revision was incredibly fast and responsive, and had the feature of running example code within the forum. The usefulness of this feature in a programming language forum cannot be overstated -- I think it shortens the average discussion thread by 50%, and makes it way more useful to boot.

This newer version looks much better but has two issues compared to the previous one: (a) it won't run example code within the forum, and (b) it won't work without JavaScript. IIUC the first will be solved shortly, the second might take a little more time (but ... if you can just run the older version in the mean time if it bothers you).

Re:Show HN: NimForum – A lightweight alternative to Discourse by dom96 on Saturday May 26, 2018 @11:24AM (#17162521)
I didn't realise the ability to run Nim code on the forum was such a coveted feature. I did initially plan to reimplement it for the new forum (the "Run" button is there, it just needs the logic), but sadly I ran out of time and decided to prioritise other things.

I've thought about continuing the non-SPA nature of the original forum, but with Araq's new Karax framework being available I couldn't resist using it (and of course Araq really wanted me to as well). Even though the forum doesn't run without JS I do still think this was a good decision. In the long run we can probably render the page on the server side, because the front end is written in Nim this should be fairly simple.

Re:Show HN: NimForum – A lightweight alternative to Discourse by beagle3 on Saturday May 26, 2018 @11:43AM (#17162613)
For sure, the new version is much more aesthetically pleasing and (if JS is enabled) at least as functional. I wasn't trying to criticize anything, just point it out as a matter of fact. I think it's a good decision too, even though I generally like non-js sites. Did you verify that Google and DuckDuckGo manage to index the forum topics? That would be my concern, much more than the "no JS, lame" crowd.

Every programming language forum has, in about 80% of the answers including a code sample, a disclaimer of the ".. or something like this, I didn't actually try to run it" -- and usually the answer also has a type, missing import/include, etc - which makes it less useful for newbies, even though it's usually helpful enough to more experienced users.

The only languages for this isn't true (that I've seen) are the APL/J/K family, where a complete working answer is usually 2-3 lines so people try it in a console before posting; and Nim since you introduced the "run" button to the older forum.