From my interaction with the Nim community, I came to the conclusion that nim could be more popular if its founder devolved decision making to scale up the community. I think he likes it the way it is; small, but his. He is Torvaldsesque in his social interactions.
I feel the same way - as I suspect a lot of people here do. Nim posts are always upvoted and usually people say nice things about the language in the comments.. but there are few who claim to actually -use- the language for more than a small private project, if even that.
The only way to really test out a programming language is by trying it out or reading how someone else approached a problem that you're interested in/know about.
There are over 2200 nimble packages now. Maybe not an eye-popping number, but there's still a good chance that somewhere in the json at https://github.com/nim-lang/packages you will find something interesting. There is also RosettaCode.org which has a lot of Nim example code.
This, of course, does not speak to the main point of this subthread about the founder but just to some "side ideas".
I worked in nim for a little bit and it truly has a lot of potential but ultimately abandoned it for the same reason. It's never going to grow beyond the founder's playground.
