Nim

Why I Stopped Learning Python, Ruby and PHP and Went All In on TypeScript

Around 2020 I made a deliberate decision to stop language tourism — spreading effort across Python, Ruby, and PHP — and consolidate around TypeScript. I haven't looked back.

The Context Switch Cost

For several years I was maintaining professional fluency across multiple languages simultaneously. Python for data pipelines and NLP work, Ruby on Rails for server-side applications, PHP surfacing in legacy projects, and JavaScript on the frontend. Each language has its own idioms, standard library conventions, ecosystem tooling, testing patterns, and community norms. I felt more marketable in the hiring game if I could claim expertise across all touchpoints.

Nim's Garbage Collection — From Automatic to None

One of the things that drew me to Nim is the degree of control it offers over memory management without forcing you to the extreme of a borrow checker. The default experience is a garbage-collected language that feels like Python. The far end of the dial is manual memory management that compiles to idiomatic C with no runtime overhead. Between those two points is a set of options worth understanding in detail — because the right choice depends heavily on what you’re building.