Permission to translate the book

[StefanSalewski]

Thanks for your request.

It's a book, maybe 30 percent finished now, I would guess we have about
200 pages now. Unfortunately the difficult parts macros, async and
parallel processing/threading are still missing.

Do you really think that translation to Japanese Language makes sense?
We had a discussion about a Chinese translation on the Nim forum
already about one year ago, and there was no clear view.

The fact is Nim is a tiny language still. I know that a few people read
my book, and like it. But only a few. Well the book was mentioned
recently at reddit with 50 upvotes, which is not bad. Unfortunately the
Nim core devs seems not to like the book too much, at least they have
not mentioned it somewhere on their home page. Well maybe they want to
sell the Manning book.

My current estimation is: When I finish the book, so that it has about
500 pages, and try to sell it I may be able to sell 50 pieces a year
for a period of maybe 4 years. Price would be 29 Euro per piece as
HTML/PDF. For early buyers, final price may be 39 or 49 Euro. This
would be for people from central Europe, USA, Canada, Japan. For people
in very poor or unfree countries like north Korea, China, Africa and
for children under 16 years old I would offer free download, which of
course other people may misuse. Of course a fully free book would have
some more readers, at least more downloads, but 29 Euro should be
really not too much as its help beginners to learn computer
programming.

So, for 50 readers a year for the English text, do you still think that
an Japanese edition would make sense at all? For China it is different,
they really have a lot young people without good English knowledge, so
indeed I could imagine for a Chinese version as much readers as for the
English one.

Translation is a lot of work. For english german google translate works
not bad, so I would do an automatic translation. Does that work as well
for Japanese language already?

Unfortunately I can not promise when I will finish the book, and if at
all. I spent only 400 hours for it til now, which is not that much (I
spent 1600 hours on the gintro bindings in the last 5 years totally).
But the current content is a direct flow from my head to the text, so
it was fast. Macros, threading, async would be much slower. And I am
still not sure if I should write about macros and async at all, as the
book is for beginners, and macros is advanced stuff.

So you should really think about your idea carefully, maybe ask your
friends, maybe ask at pages like reddit, maybe at the Nim forum. Note
that I am not sure if I will continue using the Nim Forum, the people
are really a bit too unfriendly sometimes, see

https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/7832

"Alternatively you can always phrase your posts in a more civilized
manner."

Generally my feeling is that currently some translation of the official
docs, as the tut1 and tut2 makes more sense and is much less work, and
the official docs are already in a more stable state, while my book is
still work in progress. For people with some computer science
background the official docs are fine.

But I have to admit that I don't know it. I started the book about one
year ago because we had in the last years some beginners without any
experience in computer programming, and they ask if they should learn
Nim as first language. A serious answer was no, better learn Python or
C first, as we have not too much learning resources. Some Nim devs said
yes, just start with Nim. But often then the beginners tried for a few
months, failed and vanished. My hope was to improve the beginner
experience with the book.

Final point: The young people seems to like videos today. We had
someone who made a collection of about 25 beginner videos, while he was
a beginner himself, I guess he has never written actual Nim software. I
tried to watch his videos for some minutes... But people seem to like
it? Videos are one reason why my expected selling rates for the book
are so low. And Nim homepage promotes the videos, they linked it.

The situation would drastically change when teachers would start
teaching Nim at school or as first language in first year at
university. But I don't think this will happen soon.

For the discussion about a Chinese translation see

https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/6170#38113

[shayanhabibi]

Dear Dr Salewski,

You truly give meaning to the concept of a Doctor as an educator. The nim community is honoured to have such a Doctor helping advance knowledge in the language and its uses.

While the book is still being developed on your website, a link to this GitHub IN THE INTRODUCTION/HEADER for people to contribute would be helpful (I was certainly not aware the source was on GitHub).
A link to a patreon would not hurt either; I personally would donate towards such a well formed source such as yours with its development.

My intention will be to provide spelling and grammatical corrections now that I have found the source project.

There is also a great niche in every learning platform that provides video courses on programming subjects as I have not yet encountered nim-lang courses. While I can understand your apprehension to forming video series, it would be a matter of you finding a person to act as the medium for creating the "vocal" english content (if that was the part you are not comfortable with).

I hope you and your family have been well throughout this pandemic and the floodings in Germany.

Thanks,
Shayan

[StefanSalewski]

While the book is still being developed on your website, a link to this GitHub IN THE INTRODUCTION/HEADER for people to contribute would be helpful (I was certainly not aware the source was on GitHub).

Yes you are right, I should add a link in the HTML formated book to the Asciidoctor source code at github. But indeed most people who know about the existence of the book would not have much trouble to find the github sources, to contact me per email or on Nim forum. But as the book is not listed at Amazon some people do not know about its existence at all. Nim core devs do not really promote it -- well they may have their reasons, maybe want to sell the Manning book or write a new one their self? And well my book is mostly for kids, and we have not that many kids in the Nim community currently, I think we had a few some years ago.

A link to a patreon would not hurt either;

Unfortunately the number of "customers" is tiny yet. Getting maybe 50$ from a dozen of readers would not make a difference for me. But when the number of readers should increase to a few hundred each year, then some form of monetary compensation would make sense. We will see.

My intention will be to provide spelling and grammatical corrections now that I have found the source project.

I would recommend to concentrate on the content first. Is all provided information fully correct and easy to understand? What is missing? For gramer and spelling various tools exists, which I can use to fix that. But makes not that much sense as long as the book is still in development -- indeed I intend to continue in winter. And for the case that the book is ever finished and we may even create a paper version I may hire a native proofreader. I would consider accepting a co-author for the really demanding stuff like macros, threading, async -- maybe. But only very few people are able to write about that stuff in highest quality, and async and threading are still in heavy development.

provides video courses

There are a lot videos available already, and Nim page promotes them:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvwc2YT9MFOlPPexrsY-t7BNTdg2Vsx06

And there are some more. And also the videos of NimConf and similar talks.

I should better not comment about the quality of the Kiloneie video series, but some people really seems to like them. Its a funy fact that some people like to produce videos BEFORE they learn a language and before they have written some larger high quality tools in that language. But I think at least some of the NimConf videos are OK, I have indeed watched a few of them.

I hope you and your family have been well throughout this pandemic and the floodings in Germany.

Yes all fine. No flood here in northern Germany, and I will get my first Biontec vaccine in the next few days :-)

[shayanhabibi]

my book is mostly for kids

I would disagree with this; it is a perfect resource for anyone wanting to learn programming/coding/scripting. I picked up programming as an adult while working at a pharmacy to develop a GUI application to serve our needs. Now that I wish to further this project I have picked up nim. Most users who learn programming/coding such as me tend towards Python due to its low barrier of entry and extensive resources. Any language benefits from more users at any stage and this resource you have developed provides that lowered barrier of entry. Naturally I can understand there is a disconnect from those heavily involved with system programming/computer science with those who simply want to make something and learn the skills for their own purposes which results in the current resources being heavily documented for those with the background to understand them.

There are a lot videos available already, and Nim page promotes them

To be frank, I think they have simply promoted the ‘best’ resources available. As someone with ADD those videos are painful to watch. When you have a ‘learning disability’ you realise how terrible most educational resources are. There is also the issue that while there are basic videos available, as you have said, they are unable to cover the more advanced topics and uses since they are unable to take advantage of them themselves.

I have spent numerous hours scouring for answers to what should be well documented questions. Rather than scouring the forums for how to use templates in what should be quite a typical manner, there should be a set of resources already available that explain and show the typical REAL use cases. I didn’t truly understand how to use templates and locks until I spent the time digesting the source code for the threadpool and locks module. While that is a very good way to learn, it is a high barrier of entry in effort that would not be spent by most people.

It can be argued that nim is still in heavy development; however, this lack of documentation is what hamstrings new-entry from non-programming/computer science users.

None of this is really pertinent to anything other than me trying to demonstrate the importance of documents such as yours to all ages and users even within nim. Perhaps this is more of a rant for me than any issue to be taken with you.

Thank you for your time and effort; I will certainly bring up any sections I think could be explained better etc.