[dibujaron]

This article makes Odin sound extremely well-known. I've never heard of it before, and I feel like I keep up with programming topics pretty diligently. Admittedly I don't work at the systems programming layer, but I've definitely heard plenty about Rust and c++ topics.

Curious if others feel similarly, or maybe I just happened to miss it?

[recursivecaveat]

I would consider it extremely obscure overall. A large majority of programmers would not be aware of its existence. At the same time there are clearly much less popular languages with articles so it is kindof weird to push to delete. (eg: random scheme implementation w/ no releases in 20 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SISC) I would say that wikipedia broadly favors programming languages as far as notability. Like most nerd/geek things their footprint skews toward the internet, and people who enjoy geek stuff are more likely to be wikipedia admins than the general population.

[woodruffw]

This is an argument for deleting those non-notable articles as well, not retaining other non-notable articles.

[nvme0n1p1]

SISC is there because it's not notable, so the busybodies haven't even noticed the page exists. Odin, however, is notable, and that put it on their radar as a target for attacking its notability.

[stymaar]

And here's the persecution LARPing the article talks about.

[HappyPanacea]

So why is that article not deleted yet?

[lambdaone]

I see it's been nominated for deletion today. Looking at it, it's been marked for attention for two years, so it's not as if people haven't had time to do anything about it.

[torginus]

Unfortunately what makes a programming language famous is usually not the thing that makes it useful.

For example, Go got famous because of how much they pushed channels and launching thousands of green threads per app as the next big thing.

Over time, people kind of soured on these ideas, but Go was a great, simple language with good DX that built static executables.

As a contrast, languages like Kotlin or Swift also brought huge DX improvements to their respective audiences, but didn't really have any standout (novel or divisive) features that made people talk about them.

Odin's like that - it's basically C (or more accurately Pascal) with better generics and some gamedev related features, so it's not as painful to write as plain C.

[chris_wot]

Not more obscure than Brainfuck.

[traes]

What? Brainfuck is the single least obscure esoteric programming language. It's the most famous example of a simple Turing complete language and its provocative name gets it a fair amount of media coverage outside its niche.

[akritid]

And it’s also a reinvention of Corrado Bohm’s P’’ which is even more seminal

[chris_wot]

Could you use it in production?

[traes]

From Cambridge dictionary:

obscure (adjective)

not known to many people:

- an obscure island in the Pacific

- an obscure 12th-century mystic

Why does its use in production matter? Perhaps the syntax itself is obscure, but we're not discussing syntax but general awareness. Anyway, the most common "real" use of brainfuck is to prove Turing completeness of other things by finding a way to compile them into brainfuck.

[chris_wot]

If you quote the dictionary to win an argument, quote it in full. There are two definitions of obscure in the Cambridge dictionary. The other is:

obscure (adjective)

not clear and difficult to understand or see:

- Official policy has changed, for reasons that remain obscure.

- His answers were obscure and confusing.

- "the syntax itself is obscure"

[yellowapple]

I could use (and have used) Körber/HighJump Advantage Architect in production, and yet that's nonetheless so far from notable that Körber's own Wikipedia page doesn't even bother to mention its acquisition of HighJump and the software products thereof, let alone the proprietary graphical programming language which HighJump's customers use to configure and customize their flagship warehouse management system.

Needless to say: production use ≠ notability, for very good reason.

[dismalaf]

It's kind of niche but is getting bigger. The Discord server has 10k members, the biggest(?) Twitch programming streamer has been using it recently, JangaFX is big enough to be used by AAA game companies and a few large film studios, and I'm sure there's plenty of users who aren't on the Discord server.

If you're comparing it to Rust/C++ you must live in a cave or something. So yes. It's not that big. But it's probably in the top 10 of hyped languages of the current year. There's a bunch of languages from the 60's to 90's on Wikipedia that have probably never had as many users or software shipped as Odin.

[baranul]

You never hearing about Odin, is an example of why its article was rejected by Wikipedia, because they failed at providing reputable references. The languages that you likely know of, often are corporate backed, with large marketing budgets and backdoor deals to help saturate traditional and social media.

Newer languages, not of corporate origins, usually struggle to achieve public awareness or are purposefully choked out by negative propaganda and negative marketing tactics being unleashed against them. To achieve enough public awareness and momentum, they often need a certain level of luck, where a number of factors fall their way.

[andai]

The author protested the framing, but it's very much a game-dev oriented language. In fact, it's the most pleasant language for game development I have ever used. It comes with all sorts of "batteries included" in that direction, possibly more than any other existing language. (Well, I still didn't get my Jai invite, so who knows ;) Odin was a major influence on Jai.)

[jibal]

The author knows the orientation of his language better than anyone else.

> Odin was a major influence on Jai.

This is a popular joke because of the release timeline. The reality is the inverse, and Ginger Bill has acknowledged the influence of Jai.

[wtetzner]

> The author knows the orientation of his language better than anyone else.

The author knows the intention of the language better than anyone else, but that doesn't mean it isn't especially game dev oriented.

[jibal]

Ginger Bill directly addresses this erroneous argument in TFA:

> Many people think Odin is "just for games" at the moment, but that tells you more about the people who say that than Odin itself. This is especially true when gamedev is pretty much the most wide domain possible where you will do virtually every area of programming possible.

> Odin is a general purpose language; is capable of being used in numerous different areas from application development, servers, graphics, games, kernels, CLI/TUIs, etc.

[wtetzner]

> The author knows the orientation of his language better than anyone else.

^ I was only addressing this comment, not the specifics of Odin.

> Odin is a general purpose language; is capable of being used in numerous different areas from application development, servers, graphics, games, kernels, CLI/TUIs, etc.

I would argue that being capable of doing anything is not in conflict with being oriented around something specific. Any Turing complete language is capable of those things.

Again, I don't even know Odin, so I'm not addressing whether or not it is game dev oriented. Only that the arguments themselves don't seem sound.

EDIT: grammar/formatting

[dismalaf]

Is C++ a game oriented language because most game engines and games are written in it?

[andai]

Yeah oriented might be the wrong word here. "Surprisngly well suited for the job" is more like it. It was very ergonomic. In fact, I ended up translating my Odin game to several other languages and the experience was quite painful. (That's one way to measure the quality of a language! How much it hurts to port code out of it.)

[andai]

I clearly remember Jonathan Blow talking about how Jai's syntax was influenced by his conversations with Bill. But it was 10+ years ago, so I might have gotten it mixed up.

I think the influence ended up going both ways eventually though.

[jibal]

Yes, you have it mixed up ... Jai development started 2 years before Odin. And the claim was

> Odin was a major influence on Jai

which simply isn't true. Just google it, e.g.,

https://handmade.network/forums/t/1338-the_odin_programming_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Jai/comments/1j2idvz/is_odin_kind_o...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46317815

[panzi]

I am interested in programming language topics and I certainly have heard of Odin and have seen a couple of interviews with Ginger Bill. Same with Zig, Rust, Jai, C++ etc. I haven't used much of these (only C++ and Rust out of these), though. But I find that stuff interesting.

[klibertp]

> I've never heard of it before [...] but I've definitely heard plenty about Rust and c++ topics.

Programming is a very broad and deep discipline. If you're a programmer for some time, chances are you know of very niche projects (10 stars on GH) in your domain/stack/platform. It says nothing about your familiarity with much less niche (10k stars on GH) projects outside your domain/stack/etc.

The only ways for you to learn about Odin are to be interested in programming languages in general or to be working in the specific niche Odin tries to conquer (+ some luck).

In other words, a "normal programmer" not knowing about one of literally hundreds of languages out there is expected, but says little about the notability of said language.

> maybe I just happened to miss it?

You did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43970800 But that's normal - it's impossible to keep track of domains you're not interested in. Programming language development (for languages that don't pay your bills) is not something programmers need to follow. It's a conscious choice to become interested in this very specific, deep, and niche domain. If you were interested in PLs, you'd almost certainly know about Odin - you probably still wouldn't know Odin itself, unless you're specifically interested in "ergonomic, low-level C replacement" languages and, for some reason, concluded that Zig is not for you.

[3836293648]

I think you just happened to miss it. It's very commonly mentioned in the new systems space, alongside Jonathan Blow's jai.

[loeg]

It's relatively well known? Certainly not mainstream.

[krautsauer]

It's been here a few times, maybe 4-6 times in the past year?

[firesteelrain]

I have only heard about it because of HN.

[steveklabnik]

I feel like if you’re into programming languages as a hobby, the chances you know of Odin are pretty high. Not everyone can know everything, of course, but my impression is that it punches above average on notability within the niche.

[jibal]

Odin is extremely well known to every human being who keeps up on programming language development, along with Zig, Nim, D, Jai, V, Crystal, Carbon, and others. "programming topics" isn't relevant.

[woodruffw]

I keep up with PL development, and I am only vaguely aware of Odin (and same for Jai and V).

(But this isn’t the point: lots of programmers know about relatively obscure thing, but that does not itself make them notable. Notability is a well-defined property on Wikipedia.)

[stymaar]

This exactly!

There are probably thousands of JavaScript packages on NPM that are more well-known than Odin, that doesn't mean they deserve their own Wikipedia page.

[FullGarden_S]

You make it sound like you're confusing popularity with notability.

Unlike Jai and V, Odin has been in commercial use(JangaFX) for years now with several high performance computing products written entirely in Odin and the customers of JangaFX includes several AAA video game and VFX corporations. A lot of programmers not knowing or the language not being mainstream does not mean that its non-existent.

The Notability of Wikipedia is just the involved admin's opinionated bias. As simple as that. Its always been like that and it'll probably always be like that as Wikipedia seems like it isn't are capable of operating while changing that.

[woodruffw]

Notability is a qualified state on Wikipedia, as both TFA and Wikipedia itself document.

One of the qualifications is having third-party sources document the subject, where those third-party sources are themselves notable and reputable (in the subject area). A company’s statement that it uses a programming language might be factual, but that doesn’t necessarily make it notable.

(To be clear: I was only vaguely aware of Odin, and I have no idea who/what JangaFX. But that isn’t dispositive.)

[FullGarden_S]

To be clear, I was not talking about Odin specifically. This is about notability in general.

>where those third-party sources are themselves notable and reputable (in the subject area)

this is where the bias kicks in. It would be great if Wikipedia's notability goes "All youtube sources are not reliable" but instead its always phrased like "Some Youtube sources are not reliable" and what qualifies as this "some" is usually decided by the personal bias of the admins.

[woodruffw]

> It would be great if Wikipedia's notability goes "All youtube sources are not reliable" but instead its always phrased like "Some Youtube sources are not reliable" and what qualifies as this "some" is usually decided by the personal bias of the admins.

You can read the policy yourself[1]. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to me at all.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Video_links