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With the news of Bram Moolenaar’s death at age 62, fans around the web shared their memories of a life lived, including a personal project known only to a few: his own programming language. Moolenaar, the creator of the Vim text editor, worked on Vim for over 30 years, constantly improving it and making it a labor of love.

In addition to Vim, Moolenaar also had a personal project called Zimbu, a custom-crafted programming language. Zimbu aimed to make coders more productive by removing clutter and making code easier to read. One of its unique features was the omission of opening curly braces around a block of code. The language also allowed optional parentheses around conditions for “if” or “while” statements and optional semicolons to reduce clutter.

Zimbu included both static typing and dynamic typing, as well as garbage collection for memory management. It offered multi-threading with asynchronous communication and the extensibility of object-oriented programming with more flexible language concept mixins. Objects in Zimbu were indicated with the dollar-sign sigil.

Moolenaar designed Zimbu to be portable, even usable in the browser. He created the Zimbu Web Toolkit, which allowed both server and client code to be written in Zimbu by generating binary code for the server and JavaScript for the client.

Throughout his talk on Zimbu, Moolenaar emphasized the importance of consistency in language design and advocated for plain-English words instead of cryptic terminology. He also shared his ambition of building testing into the compiler itself and allowing users to add features through compiler plugins.

One of the most distinctive features of Zimbu was its use of capitalization. Reserved keywords were written in all uppercase letters, while built-in type names were all lowercase.

While Zimbu may be a lesser-known programming language, it showcased Moolenaar’s vision and creativity in pushing the boundaries of coding.

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