I used to work at a place whose webserver was in TCL (AOLServer). Once I figured out some of the gotchas, I learned to really like TCL.
Like you mention, it's used as glue in lots of places, for instance in my Electrical Engineering classes to glue together VHDL/Verilog and program FGPAs.
They are beautiful, but they don't come one at a time. They make their thick webs _everywhere_ and in big groups. You can't escape them during spider season.
I work on a desktop budgeting application. I love that it's desktop-only (and so do the users)! It doesn't earn a living (yet), but it makes more than enough to cover expenses.
I've had great success using SQLite as both a desktop application file format and web server database. I'll mention just one thing I like about it in the desktop application realm: undo/redo is implemented entirely within SQLite using in-memory tables and triggers following this as a starting point: https://www.sqlite.org/undoredo.html
> but not so small that there are no useful libraries written...
Says the person responsible for a ton of really useful, well-done Nim libraries, such as this amazing Cairo/Skia-like library: https://github.com/treeform/pixie#readme
Nim has been such a fun language to use. I make a money-earning desktop application (Electron for the GUI and Nim for the core logic) and companion web service (fully Nim). It has been a pleasure using Nim to make these and other things.
It has never caused a problem for me. I didn't even know it was a "feature" until I'd used Nim for a year. In theory it seems like a terrible idea. In practice, it has never caused any problems.
When I first signed up with Stripe years ago, it was a breath of fresh air. Stripe did one thing exceedingly well, at an understandable price and took minutes to integrate with.
I could sell Stripe to my developer friends (and did, a lot!) in a single sentence: "You can add credit card charging to your site in about 15 minutes for 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction." I can't do that anymore. Stripe is no longer a single-sentence sell.
Stripe still does good work. But the air is getting murkier. I'll point to some objective changes, but mostly Stripe is just starting to feel different.
- Several years ago, when I saw announcements that Stripe started supporting ACH payments (and later international payments), I thought, "Great! This is Stripe! I'll just be able to flick a switch and turn those on." Not so. I understand that it's complicated from their end. It's just not the same "Stripe is so easy" experience. "Stripe is supposed to abstract away the complexity, not expose it to me."
- The pricing page is a big sign of the added complexity. There used to just be one or two numbers on that page [1]. Compare that with the current pricing page [2]
My suggestion to you, pc: Start a little company within Stripe to disrupt Stripe (i.e. re-simplify) in the same way Stripe disrupted the industry 10 years ago. Or keep getting bigger and become just as complex as the things Stripe replaced.
I've tracked my finances for as long as I can remember. It's become even more important since getting married.
We track every penny. About once a month we sit down and categorize every purchase we made the last month. We only keep receipts if the purchase was for a non-obvious category (e.g. buying both diapers and groceries at Target) so that we can split each transaction between categories.
For some banks, we manually download transaction data in whatever nice format they provide. For others, we use a syncing service that works with the app.
It's been so great throughout our marriage to know that we're both in charge of the money and make decisions together.
That said, I've talked with many people who don't like that level of detail. At first, it was baffling to me that people didn't know the details of their finances, but as I've grown, I've realized that there's plenty more than one good way to manage your money.
Full disclosure: I actively work on and sell budgeting software.
Yes! I use Nim on macOS to build a Windows exe for bootstrapping a Windows VM. A year ago, you had to dig a little to figure out the right command line incantation, but maybe it's better now.
I'm using Nim in production (combined with NodeJS) and I really like it. Cross-compiling is so easy. Testing is easy. Syntax is easy to read. I like it.