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Enu is an MIT licensed 3D sandbox for learning to code, experimenting, and having fun. In this video we implement an out of process MCP server and teach Claude to build 3d worlds in Nim.

That's my history too. I remember spending hours in the 80's drawing LINEs and CIRCLEs in a loop, making tunnels, flowers, and whatever else I could come up with that looked cool. I didn't ever finish anything really, I mostly just played around, but it felt like I was on the cusp of something new and exciting, and that anything was possible.

That's the feeling I'm trying to capture with Enu. I'm sure it won't land for a lot of people, and that's ok, but I hope someone out there finds it and makes something really amazing, even if they're the only one who can see it.

Yes. It’s so you can maintain a consistent style in your code base even if your dependencies use different styles. Nim has excellent C/C++ interop and it’s relatively common to interact with C or C++ symbols directly, and being able to do this without needing to adopt the dependency’s style or wrap everything is nice.

In python, for historical reasons the logging module uses camelCase while most other modules use snake_case, so it isn’t really possible to use the logging module and maintain a consistent style. This is a non-issue in Nim.

Enu is a multiplayer programming environment powered by Nim and Godot. It's meant to teach kids to code, make 3D game programming easier, and for experimenting and having fun. It's MIT licensed and will be usable to create standalone games.

Enu is powered by the belief that text based programming can be accessible to kids if made simple enough, and that text is more flexible than visual programming using tools like Scratch and Game Builder Garage. I still have lots of work to do to improve discoverability, but based on my experience using it to run a coding club and teaching my own children, I believe the theory mostly holds. It's inspired by Logo and Minecraft, has a terse syntax for building nested state machines (although it calls them Command Loops), and tries to make it possible to build full games using only simple concepts like loops and conditionals.

I've been working on Enu for almost 4 years now (very much part time) and have put out a few releases already, but I believe this is the first version that really captures what Enu is all about. Let me know what you think!

Hey all. Enu is my project, and it's really nice to see some interest. It looks like I'm a few days late to this thread, but I'd be very happy to answer questions if anyone is still around.

The first real MVP of Enu will be releasing before the end of the month. 1.0 is years off, but the basics are mostly there and it seems like a good time to put up a web site, write some docs, and see if people actually want to use the thing.

Thank you! I hope so. My bet is that text based code can be as easy as drag and drop (but much more flexible) if things are kept extremely simple and concise, and the commands and keywords are discoverable. I think I've made good progress on the simple and concise bit. Discoverability needs work, but I believe it's solvable.

Thanks! I suppose it's primarily, but not exclusively, aimed at kids. It has rudimentary multiplayer support now, and my hope is that it can be a place for people to build and learn together. I want schools to use it for programming classes, and for friends and families to hang out, teach each other, and build simple games together.

Initially I used Godot’s scene format to store Enu’s levels, so someone could learn and prototype in Enu, then load the project into Godot for things Enu didn’t support. That didn’t really pan out though and I’ve dropped the idea for now. I’d love to revisit some day.

Currently Enu is just a consumer of Godot. I’ll update the description soon. Thanks for the interest!

This particular example isn't actually an issue in Nim. The first letter of a nim identifier is case sensitive, so while `my_thing` and `myThing` are normalized to the same name, `my_thing` and `MyThing` are different.

Essentially nobody was a "JavaScript Developer" in 2005, 10 years after JS's release. JQuery didn't exist yet, the term "AJAX" hadn't been coined, and NodeJS was years away. Web developers were using JS to enhance pages, but it wasn't a language that was widely used to write applications. I don't know what the popularity numbers looked like so I'm not saying you're wrong, but it was definitely closer to 15 years before people started to take JS seriously.

JS aside, I think there's probably some survivorship bias going on here. I don't think there are a lot of 15 year old, relatively unpopular languages that are still under active development. Maybe it's not that languages that don't become popular in 10 years never will, but rather that languages that don't become popular in 10 years tend to be abandoned by their developers, thus sealing their fate.

It's a weird license that seems to say "you can use this as long as you don't compete with us", with an automatic switchover to Apache 2.0 in 5 years. Definitely better than closed source, but probably not Open Source by the OSI definition.