What does HackerNews think of enu?

A Logo-like DSL for Godot, implemented in Nim

Language: Nim

#4 in Nim
https://github.com/dsrw/enu - Enu is a 3d live programming environment for experimenting, making games, and learning to code. Kind of a Logo meets Minecraft type thing. It's written in Nim (using the Godot game engine), and also uses interpreted Nim for the in-world scripting.

I use it to teach kids to code. The released version is pretty rough and probably not fit for general consumption, but the next release (coming next month... I hope) is quite a lot better.

https://youtu.be/9e9sLsmsu_o is a demo making a simple survival game, and https://youtu.be/upg77dMBGDE is a now very outdated demo building towers and other simple structures. Thanks!

Less of a global sales pitch for Nim (I'm a shoo-in from Pascal), but I found this today and thought it was neat:

"Enu lets you build and explore worlds using a familiar block-building interface and a Logo inspired API."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECJsq7BeZ8w

https://github.com/dsrw/enu

Nothing here is untrue, but from my perspective it's overstated. I don't use discord, but I visit the forum daily, follow most of the RFCs, and spend a lot of time coding in Nim (https://github.com/dsrw/enu). I really like Nim, mostly like its community, and think many more people should be using it.

I'm sure fusion could have been handled better, and for 2021 the roadmap was a bit hazy, but I can't think of any other big missteps. Araq, dom, PMunch, and other senior folks are in the forms helping people and answering questions every day, and my interactions with all of them has been very positive. The big post 1.0 feature was arc/orc, and that was very well communicated. Bugs are being fixed, useful new features are being added, and future plans are being discussed in the open.

And Nim itself is great. The "if it compiles, it works" factor is high, yet I almost never feel like the compiler is fighting me. Simple things are simple (I'm teaching it to a group of 12 year olds), it's incredibly flexible, it's fast, and it's suitable for almost any sort of problem. There's nothing else like it, and I expect I'd continue using it for at least a decade even if it switched into maintenance mode tomorrow. I think it will take at least that long for something better to come along.

This is cool. I'm working on something similar called enu (https://github.com/dsrw/enu), but you're further along than I am.

A few suggestions that may or may not be helpful:

- I realize that this is a big part of your esthetic, but blocky "game fonts" are hard to read. They're fine for games, but for editing code I want a normal monospace font rendered at a normal DPI.

- I feel like there should be a way to apply code changes without a full Publish. It's nice to test a change without resetting the entire world.

- Your docs are off to a good start, but it's really not clear to me how everything comes together. A more in depth example would be more helpful at this point than API docs, I think.

I'll definitely keep an eye on this. Nice work!

Thanks! The repo is at https://github.com/dsrw/enu, but it's still a month or two away from what I'd consider "reveal worthy". There are no docs, and what's there barely works. However, I really wanted to be part of NimConf, so I cobbled things together as best as I could. I'm going to do a bigger PR push when it's a little farther along.