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